Transcript: All EN Payments Call
August 26, 2014
All Employment Network (EN) Payments Call
3 – 4 p.m. EDT
The OSM provides transcripts in a rough draft format created via Live Captioning which was performed to facilitate Communication Accessibility. These transcripts are not verbatim records of training sessions, webinars or conference calls.
Operator: Today is Tuesday, 26 August, 2014. Ladies and gentlemen, please stand by, the conference will begin momentarily. We thank you for your patience and ask that you please remain on the line.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the august all en payments call. During the presentation all participants will be in listen only mode. Afterwards we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time if you have a question please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. You may also use the chat feature located in the lower left corner of cur screen. If you need to reach an operator at any time please press star zero. As a reminder this conference is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference over to Janet Cousin, supervisor for the payments help desk team.
Janet Cousin: Thanks, Mandy, again welcome to the All EN Payments Call. If you are a new Employment Network or EN we welcome you and thank you for working with Social Security beneficiaries. Thanks for our returning en's who join us each month, we look forward to having you participate with us. We hope this call helps you to understand the many intricacies of payment processing for the ticket to work program. Again, my name is Janet Cousin and I will be hosting the call going forward. I am the supervisor for the payments help desk team and happy to be here.
Joining me today is Debbra Tennessee, manager of the Ticket Operations Department for the program. Also joining us is Kathy Dyson, consultant and training coordinator and Kathy will be the primary speaker today as we talk through the agenda items.
We also have Daniella Armstrong of the Social Security admin team on the line. There are no handouts for today's call. However, the agenda has been posted online and is being shared via the web. This will be an interactive session and you will be invited to ask questions after each topic by pressing the 1 and then the 4 over the phone. We do ask any questions you are asking over the phone pertain to the topic at hand since many of those questions might be asked later in the presentation. Also, when you ask questions do not provide information regarding your personal cases due to confidentiality issues. You can also ask questions in our chat room. We have Charles Powell, who is our technical assistant with the program available and he will be answering your questions in the chat room. If we're not able to address all of your questions in the chat room during the conference call we'll certainly make sure that someone gets back to you after the call.
So today's discussion will focus on payment requests and earnings evidence review. I'll turn the presentation over to Kathy to get started.
Kathy Dyson: Well, good afternoon to everyone. And welcome to the all en payments call. This afternoon we are going to actually speak on some topics in which we were able to retract some of this information from our payment help desk staff. We polled them to see what some of the concerns were or outgoing diaries that were more frequent than others and this is what we came up with so we thought this would be an excellent opportunity to speak on information we feel would be very helpful to the Employment Networks.
First on the agenda is actually the pay stubs and what we are noticing is that when receiving pay stubs that there are concerns that will hinder or delay the processing of cases.
Let me, if I may, just give some information as to what is required on the primary pay stubs when submitting them.
We need the employer's name, we need the actual ticket holder's name, we need the pay period beginning and the pay period ending date, we need the actual pay dates. We need gross earnings and the applicable tax deductions such as FICA. Any of this information that is missing will delay the processing of the case.
Now, of course, if the pay stubs that are provided by the ticket holder does not provide all of the information then the Employment Networks are able to submit what we call an SES, or the Employment Network supplemental earnings statement to accompany the pay stubs. So again if all of the information just mentioned is not available then please in addition with that you may want to submit the actual en supplementary earnings statement. Any information from the stubs that you have you want to roll that information over to the actual form and then fill in the missing information so that we can match the two documents together.
Now, of course, once we receive your payment request along with the pay stubs in the event we have verified earnings and SSA data base that can accommodate that particular claim or the payment type, then we won't diarize the case and send it back for the supplemental statement, we will process the case. But if there are supplemental earnings there it will delay the processing of the case if we do not have the supplemental earnings statement in conjunction with the pay stub.
Janet Cousin: Thanks, Kathy for that overview and providing information about the pay stub requirements. Mandy, if you can open the line and see if we have any questions from our callers we'd like to take the time to see if we have questions associated with the first item, pay stub requirements.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to register for a question please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. You will hear a 3-tone prompt to acknowledge your request. If your question has been asked and you would like to withdraw your question, please press the 1 followed by the 3.
You may also submit a question using the chat feature located in the lower left corner of your screen.
Our first question comes from the line of Nicole Dommitz, please go ahead.
Nicole Dommitz: Hi, there, my question may be a bit premature but I'm new to this payment process and I received an email saying I had not submitted enough information on a particular beneficiary but it didn't indicate who that beneficiary was and in that same period of time there's been multiple payment requests. Is there an easy way to figure out which beneficiary is in question?
Debbra Tennessee: This is Debbra Tennessee speaking. It sounds as though you received an outreach email from our payments help desk and normally when we send something from our payment help desk we do reference a work case number and if not a work case number shouldn't that email be encrypted if there's PII attached to it?
Yes, if you are going to attach the beneficiary's name and Social Security it should be encrypted in either an excel spreadsheet or a word document password/en encrypted with your 5-digit IVR pin so that we both use the same password so that it's easy for the staff here to open up any attachments that are encrypted.
And Nicole, if you did receive an email without reference to a work case number, and the reference to a work case number is so you can check the particular beneficiary on the en payment status report; the work case number is another way to identify the beneficiary. If we had a work case number there you could go to the en payments status report, work that work case number with the work case number on the en payment status report, and then do the name of the beneficiary as well as the Social Security number. But if you did not get any of that in your email just send the email back and basically state what you are saying, that the work case number was omitted or there's no information identifying the beneficiary so there's no way for you to tell which one of the beneficiaries you need to submit additional information.
Nicole Dommitz: Thank you so much.
Janet Cousin: Thank you for that question. Are there any additional questions, Mandy?
Operator: Yes, our next question comes from the line of Sarah Martins. Please go ahead.
Sarah Martins: I have a question with regard to actual payment verification. We have had a couple clients who have a little bit of a hard time getting their actual paycheck stubs. One in particular of my clients just gets a check from his employer, doesn't necessarily have all of the information that is needed for this. So should I submit the supplemental earnings statement along with a copy of his check which has the employer's name and the employee's name?
Kathy Dyson: No, that would not be sufficient because we do not know that that employer is deducting FICA taxes, which he should be doing. In that situation what you would need to get is an employer-prepared statement. That is a form from our web site that the employer fills out and Social Security wants to know that employer is paying FICA taxes or Social Security taxes on behalf of that beneficiary and the correct amount of FICA and Medicare taxes are being withheld from that beneficiary.
If we do not have the withholding for that beneficiary for FICA and Medicare it may appear this is a self-support beneficiary or contractor so we need to know what type of beneficiary that is and we need to know all the legal withholdings have been made for that beneficiary. That's information a beneficiary should be told anyway. He should be getting something from that employer other than a net or a basic check.
Sarah Martins: Okay, thank you.
Janet Cousin: Thank you and that was a great question. Do we have any additional questions, Mandy?
Operator: We have no further questions at this time.
Debbra Tennessee: I'm not sure, Kathy may have already said this and if you did I just didn't hear it, I'm sorry if you did. But one thing we want to make real clear. On these tab stubs we cannot accept any handwritten information. If you think that the information is not really clear and you write over it, we cannot accept that. It would be better if you submitted that pay stub and attached the supplemental earnings statement along with it. Do not alter or write on the pay stub or change anything on it at all, just attach the supplemental earnings statement along with it and then we can process the payment.
Janet Cousin: That's a great point, Debbra, thanks for that clarification.
Charles, do we have any questions in the chat room that are associated with pay stub requirements?
Charles Powell: Well, one is if all information is on the last pay stub is that acceptable? For example one beneficiary started with a new company who did not have payroll set up to indicate all of the required information then the next entry is the required information was listed on the last pay stub from previous check.
Debbra Tennessee: I'm really not sure. I would have to see that because, when you say all the information is not listed, what information are you talking about? We would need to know the beginning and ending pay period so we could calculate the value of the earnings, whether it was 10 days or whether it was 14 days, whether it was 5 days. And if payroll is not verified I don't understand that either because each employer should have in their payroll system a percentage for FICA taxes, Medicare taxes, some things like that, maybe not all the benefits for a particular employee but for their payroll they should definitely have a tax situation set up. I think on that one we will have to just see what you are talking about here.
Janet Cousin: Okay, great. Was there any follow-up added on that to the chat at all?
Charles Powell: Not on that question but the questions that just came in, what if a participant is missing one paycheck but the year to date information of earnings from a check before and after this check shows gross earnings and FICA taxes?
Debbra Tennessee: We can accept that because we can calculate the value of those earnings. If it's one check in between what we would do is look at the beginning and subtract out the earlier earnings from the last paycheck and that would be the value of the missing paycheck. So we would accept that.
Linda has a question about sometimes beneficiaries write on their pay stubs. And it all depends, Linda, on what they wrote. If they wrote this is my first pay stub of course we'll take that. That's not altering any information we need to see but it all depends. If it looks like the numbers have been shifted, it all depends on what it is. I know some people will take any piece of paper available and jot notes on it but as long as it doesn't hide any information we need to see it would be okay.
Janet Cousin: Great responses, thank you, Debbra and Charles.
Any additional questions?
Operator: Our next line comes from the line of Denise Evans. Please go ahead.
Denise Evans: Hello, can you hear me?
Janet Cousin: Yes, we can hear you.
Denise Evans: I was on the chat asking about the question with the beneficiary who started, she started new employment and the first check that she had for months just had the name of the company, the date, her name and what they paid her. She kept asking, you know, I need a regular check that shows the FICA, the Medicare, and all the information required. So lasted 3 months on the job so the last paycheck that she received did have all the necessary taxes taken out of it from all the previous checks that she was given without that information on it. So I did get paid for one milestone but not for the others because it said that all the information wasn't there. So I kind of don't know what to do with that.
Debbra Tennessee: You know what? I don't think I would know what to do with that, either. I would have to look at that because as I said before to another EN who had a question, we can sometimes back out information. If we have the first one and we have the last one -- like that I wouldn't even know what the pay periods are. The reason we have to know the pay period beginning date and ending date, depending on the program, earnings are calculated differently and we input those earnings into one of Social Security's system that does the calculation for us and that system requires us to input a beginning and ending date so if we don't have those, the system can't calculate the value of those earnings to let us know whether or not the beneficiary has met the level of earnings or a certain type of payment, whether it's Trial Work Level, SGA, we have a system that does the calculation for us based on the information for a pay stub. So there's a reason for us requesting that information so I would just have to see it, see what we could try to do with that.