Social Security Administration 2009 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

We are announcing that the assessment percentage rate under sections 206(d) and 1631(d)(2)(C) of the Social Security Act (Act), 42 U.S.C. 406 (d), and 1383(d)(2)(C), is 6.3 percent for 2010.

We propose to revise the criteria in the Listing of Impairments (the listings) that we use to evaluate claims under titles II and XVI of the Social Security Act (Act) involving endocrine disorders in adults and children. The proposed revisions reflect advances in medical knowledge, information we received from medical experts, comments we received from the public in response to an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) and at an outreach policy conference, and our adjudicative experience.

In accordance with the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. 552a(e)(4) and (e)(11)), we are issuing public notice of our intent to amend one routine use and add a new routine use applicable to our system of records entitled, Master Files of Social Security Number (SSN) Holders and SSN Applications, 60-0058 (the Enumeration System). The two routine uses to the Enumeration System will:

We are withdrawing seven proposed rules we published in the Federal Register that we no longer plan to pursue.

We are requesting your comments on whether and how we should revise the criteria in our Listing of Impairments (the listings) for evaluating genitourinary impairments in adults and children. We are requesting your comments as part of our ongoing effort to ensure that our listings reflect current medical knowledge. If we propose specific revisions, we will publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register.

We are considering ways to quickly identify diseases and other serious medical conditions that obviously meet the definition of disability under the Social Security Act (Act) and can be identified with minimal objective medical information. We are calling this method ``Compassionate Allowances.'' In December 2007, April 2008, November 2008, and July 2009, we held Compassionate Allowance public hearings. These hearings concerned rare diseases, cancers, traumatic brain injury and stroke, early-onset alzheimer's and related dementias, respectively. This hearing is the fifth in the series. The purpose of this hearing is to obtain your views about the advisability and possible methods of identifying and implementing compassionate

We propose to amend our regulations to allow a representative payee who will no longer be serving in that capacity to transfer accumulated benefit payments and interest directly to a beneficiary if we determine that it would be in the best interest of the beneficiary. This change would give us more flexibility in deciding how conserved funds should be handled in these circumstances. The change would also reduce or eliminate delays in the delivery of conserved funds to some beneficiaries.

We are revising our regulation to remove Vietnam and Democratic Kampuchea (now Cambodia) from the list of countries to which social security benefits may not be sent under restrictions imposed by the Department of the Treasury (Treasury). This revision reflects published Treasury regulations that removed the restrictions on sending Federal payments to beneficiaries living in those countries. In addition, we are updating the citation for Treasury's authority to restrict payments to beneficiaries living in certain countries and correcting a typographical error in one of the section headings.

We are revising our rules to allow representatives, in certain instances, to charge and receive a fee from third-party entities without requiring our authorization. We are also eliminating the requirement that we authorize fees for legal guardians or court- appointed representatives who represent claimants before us if a court has already authorized the fees. We are revising our rules to reflect changes in representatives' business practices and in the ways claimants obtain representation, and to improve the efficiency of our representative fee process.

In accordance with the provisions of the Privacy Act, as amended, this notice announces a renewal of an existing computer matching program that we are currently conducting with VA/VBA.

We are issuing public notice of our intent to establish a new system of records and routine uses applicable to this system of records in accordance with the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. 552a(e)(4) and (e)(11)). The proposed system of records is entitled the Race and Ethnicity Collection System (60-0104), hereinafter referred to as the RECS system of records. We discuss the system of records in the Supplementary Information section below. We invite public comments on this proposal. We published this proposed system of records on August 19, 2009 (document 2009-19935), with an effective date of October 9, 2009, unless we receive comments before that date that would result in a contrary determination. This current notice corrects the effective date of the proposed RECS system of records and routine uses, per below.

In accordance with the Privacy Act, as amended, this notice announces renewal of an existing computer matching program that we are currently conducting with IRS.