How Social Security Can Stop Penalizing Workers with Disabilities: Op-Ed
Jen Brooks, research associate at Cornell ILR’s Yang-Tan Institute, published an op-ed in The Hill today. The article, titled I have a disability and I found a job I love. Social Security is making me pay dearly, shares Brooks’s overpayment experience and recommendations for improving how the Social Security Administration handles overpayments to workers with disabilities.
Based on Brooks’s life story and personal experiences with decrypting complex Social Security rules, the article explains how Brooks was saddled with over $100,000 in overpayment debt based on the Social Security Administration’s antiquated procedures and poor communication. It also suggests changes that the Social Security Administration could make to ease the burden it has created for tens of thousands of workers with disabilities.
Brooks, who has a Ph.D. in sociology, describes how her “dream job” in Cornell’s ILR School allows her to “dig” into her work, “researching the barriers that people with disabilities face when trying to find and maintain employment.” Brooks has first-hand experience with some of these barriers due to her own disability, which requires that she have 24-hour attendant care. The op–ed shares how she used to use a blend of salary and Social Security benefits to afford what she needs in order to live and work independently in the community.
“This all changed last year, when Social Security abruptly stopped my monthly Disabled Adult Child payment and sent me a notice claiming that it had overpaid me $101,000. Now I cannot even afford my daily expenses, much less this massive repayment,” wrote Brooks in the op-ed. Brooks describes how Social Security’s “confusing communications and antiquated policies create a minefield that can trap even those of us who have studied this for years.”
For Brooks’s full story and her policy recommendations, read I have a disability and I found a job I love. Social Security is making me pay dearly on The Hill website.