For the past year my 11-year-old daughter has been recovering from a serious medical condition. She is expected to make a full recovery and things are going great, but her illness has incurred a lot of expenses not covered by insurance. So, on the advice of a brother in law who works in social services in another state, my wife applied to the Social Security Administration (SSA) for something called Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The application was denied because we have too much income and other resources.

I don't dispute the decision, because apparently this particular program was meant only for the very poor. I don't think my wife understood that beforehand, or she wouldn't have bothered applying. My gripe is with the SSA's explanation, in which they reveal some of their internal process. Here is a section taken verbatim from their reply letter:

How is parents' income counted?

We use the parents' gross earned and unearned monthly income.
We start with the parents' unearned income.
We subtract a living allowance for each of the children in the household who is not eligible for SSI. The amount we subtract is reduced if these children have their own income.
If the parents' unearned income is less than the living allowance for the children, we subtract the balance of the living allowance from the parents' earned income.
We subtract $20.00 from the parents' remaining unearned income. If the parents have less than $20.00 in unearned income, we subtract the balance of the $20.00 from the parents' earned income.
We subtract $65.00 from the parents' remaining earned income, and then we subtract one-half of any earnings over $65.00.
We add the remaining unearned and earned income together.
We subtract a living allowance for parents in the household.
We count any remaining income as unearned income to the child.
If we are determining SSI eligibility and payment amounts for more than one child in the household, we divide the remaining income between those children.
We add the parents' income we count to the child's own unearned income.
We subtract an additional $20.00. If the total of the child's unearned income and the parents' income we count is less than $20.00, we subtract the balance of the $20.00 from the child's earned income.
We subtract $65.00 from the child's earned income, and then we subtract one-half of any earnings over $65.00.
We combine the child's remaining unearned and earned income to get the total income used to determine the child's SSI eligility and payment.

Did you even read that whole thing, or get about halfway and skip down to here? Never mind.

I can't begin to express my disbelief that this is an actual process devised and used by sane human beings. Notice the bits about subtracting $20 and $65 at various points. Establishing those two little numbers alone must have cost the taxpayers millions of dollars in meetings, memos, presentations, charts, first class travel accommodations, and possibly dartboards and tarot cards. No doubt the SSA has some software that does these calculations and spits out the decision. Chalk up another couple $million to design, develop, test, approve, document and implement that software, train the SSA's employees to use it, and modify it annually to interface with their other constantly changing systems.

Having heard politicians talk about "cleaning up" the Social Security system, this tiny glimpse into its inner workings makes me wonder (a) whether they have any idea how much garbage they must be talking about, and (b) how many decades any likely reform plan might take. Congress and government agencies do not have a history of sweeping away bureaucracies and mazes of rules. They tend to add more complexity and cost in the name of making things better. The above seems like a classic example.

Even with millions of claims involved, could the cost of a system as nit-picky as this one really pay off in added efficiency or avoided excess payments, as opposed to a slightly less accurate system that simply takes a few figures directly off the applicant's 1040? I seriously doubt it, as much as I doubt that the average person who actually might qualify for this program would be able to figure out if they were wrongly denied. The SSA should be able to say one of the following:

"NO, because your Adjusted Gross Income on your most recent tax return was over $xxxx."

"NO, for reasons much too complicated for either you or us to understand, so we won't bother explaining. Go away, or if you want to sell us some crack call 1-800-..."