When I joined the Chicago Sun-Times — 37 years ago this month — my job was to be half the writing staff of The Adviser, a weekly publication giving readers practical advice: how to raise a dog in the city, fight a traffic ticket, pick a health club (I cooked up that last one because I wanted to find a health club myself, and figured why not combine business and pleasure? Bottom line: avoid scams that present membership as an appreciating investment and pick something close to you, so you might actually go).
I wasn’t in the features department long — on my second day at work, the city editor stopped by to say he wanted to lure me to the news side. But The Adviser gave me an affinity for those practical, how-to-get-a-stain-out-of-a-broadloom-rug type of story. A good news article makes readers think about something, a great one makes them do something.
In that light, “How Fraudsters Break Into Social Security Accounts and Steal Benefits,” by Tara Siegel Bernard, which ran Sunday on the front page of the New York Times, must be a great article, because I don’t believe I’ve ever snapped into action the way I did after reading it.
The story begins with an 88-year-old woman who had her Social Security benefits redirected by a criminal, who changed the bank account her check was sent to.
“This particular fraud — where criminals use stolen personal information to break into online Social Security accounts or create new ones, and divert benefits elsewhere — has plagued people for more than a decade,” Bernard writes.
And I realized: I’d never signed up online with Social Security to create an account, at myaccount.ssa.gov. So anybody who got my Social Security number — from a data breach, say — could go online, sign up for me, apply for my benefits which, being 63, I’m eligible to start receiving, then direct the money wherever they pleased. And I’d never know it happened, maybe not for years, until I go to retire and discover that someone is already receiving my benefits.
I leaped up from the breakfast table, bolted upstairs and immediately signed up.
It couldn’t have taken 10 minutes. Government gets a bad rap, particularly since there’s a whole political party dedicated to tearing it down. But the process was easy.
The site is well-designed, attractive and offers lots of information — what I could receive if I retired now, which will increase substantially if I can wait until 67 and nearly double if by some miracle I can hold out until 70.
It lists your income every year since you began working — in my case, 1977, when I earned $306 scooping sundaes at Barnhill’s Ice Cream Parlour in Berea, Ohio. Earning income 46 out of the past 47 years.
Despite this nearly half-century of steady employment, I’m still counting on Social Security to tide me over through my years of solitude, irrelevance and decline — whoops, my golden years — and I can’t imagine anyone not considering the future of Social Security when evaluating political candidates. As it is, we’re behind a demographic Eight Ball — in 1960, when I was born, there were five workers for every retiree receiving Social Security. Now there are fewer than three, and the ratio is dropping. Social Security needs bolstering, not cuts.
The good news is, people are retiring later. Which is not bad if you tolerate your job. I take a Philip Larkin view of work. As a young man, the English poet resented his job. “Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?” he asked. But a few decades later, he changed his mind. “Toad Revisited” begins, “Walking around in the park/Should feel better than work” and decides that it really doesn’t. That instead of being one of those “palsied old step-takers” in retirement, “turning over their failures,” he’d much rather be fussing around the office. “Give me your arm, old toad,” the poem concludes. “Help me down Cemetery Road.”
That’s a plan. Until then, not getting ripped off helps. So sign up for your Social Security account before someone else does it for you. That way, you’ll be notified if somebody tries to tamper with it, and can lock your account, so no one can change your particulars without you visiting your local office. Social Security is called “an entitlement” because you are entitled to the money. It’s your money, taken from every paycheck you ever earned. The least you can do is make sure some fraudster doesn’t get their hands on it.
