Social Security Agency Actions Questioned
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The Social Security Administration's Web site and customer service lines are pushing the need to "modernize and reform" the retirement system, saying the future shortfall is "massive and growing," and promoting personal investment accounts as a financial fix.
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Blog: Panel approves a bill that backers say will help fix the problem of Social Security number misuse and identity theft. But it has a long and uphill battle to go before it becomes law.
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State officials say it&#39;s not clear if names and Social Security numbers were accessed or stolen but urge individuals to take precautions against identity theft.
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I haven&#39;t made up my mind on the subject of private accounts for Social Security. Unlike the Bush administration, I prefer to study the facts before leaping to conclusions.
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Federal government agencies have risked exposing millions of Social Security numbers to identity thieves by including the numbers in federal liens notices, a report says.
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Whoever wins the election may have to make tough choices about Social Security's finances.
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If President Bush wants to push his plan to overhaul Social Security through Congress during his second term, he will probably have to do something he rarely did during his first term: get his hands dirty.
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Social Security battle comes as both state and private retirement plans are shifting.
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Facing stiff resistance, President Bush began searching state-by-state for support for his plan to overhaul Social Security and conceded Thursday that not all lawmakers believe the program has a serious problem.
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A U.S. senator ripped into Sun Microsystems and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) during a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday, but both the company and the agency disputed the senator&#39;s information.Sen. Chuck Grassley, a&#160;longtime critic of Sun&#39;s contracts with the U.S. government, repeated allegations that top GSA managers interfered in contract negotiations with Sun. The GSA coordinates government-wide contracts for U.S. agencies.GSA executives &quot;put pressure on the contract officer to sign a potentially bad contract,&quot; Grassley said Wednesday. &quot;All the evidence suggest that this particular contractor had been overcharging the government for years.&quot;Sun, still facing a lawsuit in Arkansas over government contracting procedures, has painted Grassley&#39;s complaints as a misunderstanding about a disagreement between GSA administrator Lurita Doan and the agency&#39;s inspector general&#39;s office. The GSA&#39;s inspector general has accused Sun of overcharging government agencies by more than $25 million in contracts dating back to June 1997.Grassley, in his speech, accused Sun of cancelling its GSA contract before an audit he requested was completed.&quot;Now, if this contract was such a &#39;good deal for America,&#39; as has been suggested by Sun and GSA management, then you would think Sun would rush to cooperate,&quot; he said. &quot;They did not. Instead, for three months, Sun complained to me, procrastinated, withheld information, and fought the audit at every step.&quot;Why would Sun cancel a contract it fought so hard to get?&quot; he added. &quot;Did Sun have something to hide?&quot;Grassley called on the GSA to fix its contracting procedures. He forwarded the results of a confidential audit of GSA and Sun to several government officials, he said.Grassley&#39;s speech was &quot;not based on accurate information,&quot; Sun said in a statement late Wednesday. &quot;Sun produced all the information requested by the contracting officer and, only after that production was complete, did we cancel the contract.&quot;Sun cancelled the GSA contract in mid-September. It did not give a reason for backing away from the contract, but said it would continue to fulfill other government contracts not affiliated with the GSA multi-award contract. &quot;We took this step reluctantly, as we have always valued our relationship with GSA and its team of committed professionals,&quot; Sun said in a statement then.The GSA, in a statement, also disputed Grassley&#39;s information. &quot;He uses false innuendo to impugn the motives of GSA management, and based on his statement regarding his investigation of the Sun Microsystem&#39;s matter, this investigation appears to be a conspiracy looking for a theory,&quot; the GSA said.The Sun contract was &quot;a good deal for the taxpayer,&quot; the spokesman added.The questions about Sun&#39;s contracts surfaced in September 2004, when the GSA Office of Inspector General received a hotline complaint about the company&#39;s pricing, according to March congressional testimony from Inspector General Brian Miller.In July 2005, the GSA told Sun resellers the agency was cancelling Sun&#39;s contract, because the company was allegedly charging government customers more than some commercial customers. Sun avoided the cancellation by agreeing to drop some prices.Sun remains a defendant in an&#160;Arkansas lawsuit alleging a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme&#160;involving IT vendors&#39; work on numerous U.S. government contracts.In August,&#160;IBM and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) separately agreed to pay&#160;the U.S. government a total of $5.3 million to settle the Arkansas allegations that the companies solicited and provided improper payments on technology contracts with government agencies. The lawsuit alleges that Sun and several other tech vendors provided kickbacks to systems integrators in exchange for favorable recommendations to government agencies.Sun has until March 2008 to respond to complaints in the lawsuit, brought by a former employee of PWC and a former employee of Accenture. In August, the&#160;U.S. Department of Justice joined the lawsuit&#160;against Sun and the other vendors.
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A recent warning from the Internal Revenue Service raises the question of when it is wise to consider placing a security freeze on your credit files.
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I haven't made up my mind on the subject of private accounts for Social Security. Unlike the Bush administration, I prefer to study the facts before leaping to conclusions. (For contrast, see the war in Iraq.)
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The Securities and Exchange Commission is finding troubling indications that mutual-fund companies and other money managers paid retirement-plan consultants to be recommended to the consultants&#39; clients, people familiar with the probe told The Wall Street
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All the tactics of a political campaign &#151; TV ads, grass-roots organizing, town hall meetings and polling &#151; are being tapped to influence opinion and pressure lawmakers in the explosive debate on Social Security.
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WASHINGTON -- President Bush, who has promised that his plan to allow private investment accounts in Social Security would give workers a &quot;better rate of return,&quot; is seriously mulling a companion effort that could cut future promised retirement benefits for millions of workers by 6 percent, even when potential gains from private accounts are included, analysts said.
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The U.S. Social Security  Administration is set to publicize its financial problems and  promote partial privatization of the government pension system  as part of a solution, despite the objections of many agency  employees, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
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SEATTLE - John Kerry doesn't talk much about Social Security on the campaign trail, but he laid out some thoughts for a voter in Everett, Wash., who doubted that the government retirement program is really in trouble.   "We've made little fixes, little jots and jags here and there, that have been able to change it," the Democratic presidential candidate said, noting that Social Security has survived 20 years of predictions that its demise is around the corner...