ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 22, 1996 TAG: 9612230092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
The Social Security Administration's computer system threatens to shortchange millions of future retirees because it is making serious errors in recording the income of many wage earners - particularly women, Latinos and Asian Americans - according to an internal agency report obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
The report, issued by the agency's San Bernardino, Calif., district headquarters, asserts that the Social Security computer system is confounded by names that do not conform to a traditional Anglo format. The agency, it says, is failing to make an adequate effort to remedy the problem.
``Our findings indicate millions of beneficiaries may be receiving less than they have paid for,'' the report warns. ``For some, especially those in locales such as Puerto Rico, the Dakotas and inner cities, the loss may be very large.''
The SSA has $234 billion worth of wage reports - some dating to 1937 - that it cannot match with individual accounts. The wage reports are used to compute benefits.
Until now, the agency has said that minorities and women have been affected no more than anyone else and has hotly denied that its policies or procedures are discriminatory.
Agency officials, arguing that they are doing a good job overall, say the $234 billion gap represents just a small portion of the wage reports the agency has handled since the program was enacted in 1935.
The San Bernardino report, however, details for the first time numerous cases in which individuals with Asian, Latino and Islamic names were mishandled by computers that did not know what to make of surnames with spaces (such as de la Rosa) or what to do with surnames that fall somewhere other than the end of a name (Park Chong Kyu and Carlos Romero Barcelo).
Women are the subjects of a large portion of the errors because they often do not notify the SSA when they change their last name after marriage.
California accounts for 35 percent of all the unmatched earnings, although the exact reasons are unclear. One small component involves Hollywood actors whose wages often are reported by studios under stage names different from those on file with Social Security, according to the report.
The report was authored by Jim Hodgson, district director for San Bernardino County and chief of the agency's six branch offices spread across the massive jurisdiction.
Under Hodgson's direction, the San Bernardino district has undertaken a wide-ranging effort to correct as many of the unmatched wage reports as possible. So far, according to the report, it has managed to fix about 100,000 mismatches nationwide over the past year.
But with an estimated 200 million unmatched wage reports, the San Bernardino group has only skimmed the surface of the problem, Hodgson acknowledged.
LENGTH: Medium: 59 linesby CNB