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     Social Security will publish an Acquiescence Ruling to Hicks v. Commissioner in the Federal Register tomorrow. This has to do with the reviews of Eric Conn cases.      They intend to apply it only in the 6 th Circuit. Here�s what I believe is the key language: Our adjudicators will decide whether there is a reason to believe that fraud or similar fault was involved in providing evidence in the individual�s case. We define a �reason to believe� as reasonable grounds to suspect that fraud or similar fault was involved in the application or in the provision of evidence. The �reason to believe� standard requires more than a mere suspicion, speculation or a hunch, but it does not require a preponderance of evidence. Adjudicators may make reasonable inferences based on the totality of circumstances, such as facts or case characteristics common to patterns of known or suspected fraudulent activity. For us to disregard evidence, it is not necessa...

     I've finally gotten around to the sort of list you've seen a lot of in the last couple of weeks -- the most important things that have happened in the Social Security world in the last decade. Below is my list but feel free to post your own list. I came up with eight and didn't want to pad it to make it ten. Constant administrative under-funding of the Social Security Administration accompanied by frequent shutdown threats and occasional actual shutdowns. Agency performance suffered as a result. Service has deteriorated to levels that would have once been thought unimaginable; After the number of Social Security disability claims soared in the 2000-2009 decade, the number of claims started declining in 2010. That decline is continuing. We think we know why claims soared from 2000-2009 -- primarily the aging of the baby boomer population -- but no one has a good handle on why the number of disability claims filed has gone down so much since then or why the declin...