Jennifer Cronenberg, NOSSCR Senior Counsel and Director of Legal Information

As SSA rapidly moves to improve their policies under Commissioner O’Malley’s leadership, multiple public-facing Program Operations Manual System (POMS) sections have required recent updating, and multiple Emergency Messages (EM) have been issued. While NOSSCR remains committed to pushing out notifications as soon as any crucial updates drop, we also wanted to take a moment to highlight some other changes that took place this month.

Generally, the POMS can be found here, but when there are changes, SSA issues a notice about what those changes are and why they were made. Those “recent changes” notices can be found here. While SSA does not provide a side-by-side comparison of the changes, NOSSCR is often able to obtain a prior copy of the POMS for comparison, and we review both old and new when providing our analysis. Emergency Messages (which provide additional instructions or temporarily supersede POMS instructions) can be found here.

Here’s a look at a few of the updates from this month that you might not have seen yet:

EM-24021 REV – 2024 Full Medical CDR Workload – while we previously announced SSA’s temporary halt on some CDRs for the remainder of FY 2024, this month SSA amended the list of cases that are excepted from this halt – so be sure to take a look at the updated EM and update your claimants accordingly.

GN 00502 TN 92 – Determining the Need for, Developing and Selecting a Representative Payee – “Youth in foster care are among the most vulnerable populations that the Social Security Administration serves. To help improve service and outcomes for youth in foster care, we are making clarifications to our foster care policy and adding an example of proper use of benefits for a child in foster care when reunification is imminent.”

EM-24020 REV – Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Underpayment Case Control Log – Here SSA provides “new procedures for technicians to follow when documenting Supplement Security Income (SSI) cases involving underpayments (UPs) of $15,000 or more requiring prepayment reviews.”

GN 03103 TN 51 – Hearings – SSA updated this section “to reflect the Division of Quality Service’s (DQS) process for handling complaints of alleged bias or misconduct by an ALJ as described in Social Security Ruling (SSR) 13-1p.”