Getting on Their Case : Aides to Congressmen Rescue Constituents Who Are Strangling in Government Red Tape

Alan Schiff is working on the case of a Burbank woman declared dead--albeit prematurely--by the federal government. Medicare had returned unpaid bills from the woman’s doctors, saying, “We don’t pay claims of people who died.”

Schiff, an aide to Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), says, “The computer had her as deceased, which was understandably aggravating her.”

When one of Berman’s constituents believes the federal government has made a mistake--lost a Social Security check, erroneously denied a relative an immigrant visa or refused a bona fide disability request--Alan Schiff is likely to hear about it.

Schiff, bearded and soft-spoken, is a congressional caseworker--a middleman between taxpayers and federal government agencies. He and his counterparts in other San Fernando Valley congressional offices spend their days doggedly trying to cut through bureaucratic red tape with a telephone and a typewriter.

Though less dramatic than televised hearings or lawmaking, congressional casework is often the last resort for those faced with nitty-gritty problems that can lead to consequences as grave as lack of medical care or homelessness. It is also the cornerstone of lawmakers’ local operations.

“Almost everything we handle is very emotional,” said Rayma Jerome, a caseworker for Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley). “It’s either money--someone has held up their check--or they have no place to live, or they want so badly to see a relative.”

Paula Sheil, Gallegly’s district assistant, told the story of a recently married Oxnard accountant who learned last January he had a brain tumor. Although the man appears to have limited use of his limbs, has lost 35 pounds and says his memory is failing, he cannot collect Social Security disability benefits because a physician deemed him able to work, she said.

Sheil recalled that the 33-year-old man told her, “I can’t even remember what my own address is sometimes.”

Sheil, who said she broke down and cried after their first meeting, is helping the stricken constituent file an appeal with the state agency that determines who qualifies for Social Security disability.

Given such high personal stakes, it is not surprising that casework is also a sure-fire way for lawmakers to secure the lifelong loyalty of voters--whatever their political persuasion.

“I don’t think there’s any question that, when you do a case for someone and it’s a successful result, it’s eternal support,” said Marc Litchman, Berman’s administrative assistant. “It would be terribly difficult to go out and vote against someone who helped you.”

Sometimes a bureaucratic impasse can be overcome with a phone call; more often it requires painstaking follow-up letters, documents and calls that can take months.

“Nine times out of 10, no injustice has been done,” Litchman said. “It’s just making government follow its own rules in a timely fashion.”

Compensation Is Modest

Caseworkers generally enter the field after graduating from college or through involvement as a community or political activist. The financial compensation is, at best, modest. A caseworker’s annual salary is $18,000 to $28,000.

The job provides initial government experience for many who later move on to higher-paying public or private-sector careers with more chance for advancement. Many enroll in graduate school after several years. Even veterans agree that listening to the troubles of others day in and day out can be draining.

“It’s depressing,” Litchman said, explaining the rapid burnout. “By the time people get to us, they’re furious. Whether we’re responsible or not, they’re venting.”

Caseworkers invariably say the redeeming value of the job is helping people solve problems.

The good ones do it with the empathy of a social worker, the patience of a fisherman and an attorney’s determination to win justice for a client.

A sense of humor helps as well.

Later the same overcast Monday afternoon, Schiff is on the phone with a widow of a disabled Vietnam veteran. The Panorama City woman wants to apply for veterans’ survivors benefits after previously being told, apparently wrongly, that she did not qualify for the government aid.

“If you go through me in Congressman Berman’s office, we’ll speed it up,” Schiff says, “We’ll just make sure it goes from the top down instead of the bottom up.”

Moments later, between bites of his chow mein lunch, he puts in a call to a veterans’ office to request application forms for the woman.

The price of failure can be steep: some cases are literally life-and-death matters.

Ginny Hatfield, a longtime caseworker for Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Tarzana), said a homeless woman “who was having a devil of a time getting benefits” came to see her in June.

Hatfield recalled that the woman had been employed in the aerospace industry until chronic back problems flared and led to debilitating depression. When she applied for disability benefits, it took the state Social Services Department 4 1/2 months to locate her extensive medical records.

No longer able to afford her apartment, the woman stored her belongings and moved into her car. When the Internal Revenue Service charged she owed back taxes, she could not obtain her tax records because she was late on her storage payments.

‘A Potential Suicide’

“In trying to deal with things, she was a potential suicide,” Hatfield said the woman’s psychiatrist told her.

Hatfield informed the federal agencies of this danger as she helped the woman seek federal benefits, and the IRS eased up on its claim. In September, the constituent qualified for Social Security disability and welfare and could receive her first payments next month.

Jerome recalled a phone call from a Chatsworth woman whose aunt lay dying in a San Francisco hospital. The woman’s sister, who lived in Iran, had flown to Hungary, where she was desperately seeking a visitor’s visa to the United States to see her sister a last time.

The American embassy had denied her application. Gallegly’s office sent a telegram asking it to reconsider.

“The niece called me two days later,” Jerome said. “She said the aunt had gone back to the embassy and was granted her visa. She was just beside herself.”

Not every overseas drama has a happy ending, however. Caseworkers are not miracle workers.

Berman’s office received a call March 2 from the lawmaker’s cousin, Harvey Levich, about one of Levich’s employees. Nicolas Raul Valladares, 56, a Cuban-born naturalized citizen living in Los Angeles, had disappeared during a visit to Cuba several weeks earlier.

Caseworker Rose Castaneda called the State Department, which, in turn, contacted the Cuban government. Authorities there reported that Valladares’ father and brother in Havana had said that they had not seen him since leaving him at the airport weeks earlier.

Finally, after many inquiries, Castaneda learned from the State Department May 19 that Valladares had been arrested and charged with unspecified crimes against the government. Because he had once been a Cuban citizen--he mistakenly carried his Cuban as well as American passport with him, Castaneda said--Cuba refused to recognize his American citizenship.

Letters from Berman to the State Department failed to free Valladares. Then Castaneda was informed June 13 that Valladares had hanged himself in his jail cell while awaiting trial. The family, maintaining he was “a very good Catholic,” refused to believe it.

“That one made me cry,” Castaneda said. “I lost a case in a big way.”

Schiff is listening to a nearly incoherent 57-year-old North Hollywood woman who says she has a broken pelvis and needs help.

“You literally cannot walk?” he asks. “What kind of help? Do you want medical help? Or do you want some cash benefits?”

When he hangs up, Schiff explains, “She doesn’t know what she wants or needs. She just got out of a county hospital. She said, ‘They treat you like dogs in there.”’

He calls a colleague at a county supervisor’s office. The supervisor’s aide agrees to refer the woman to the county Adult Protective Services, which assists the indigent. Schiff informs the woman that she will hear from the supervisor’s office: “They can tell you what programs will help.”

Sometimes a drama will play itself out right in a congressional office’s cramped quarters.

Former U.S. Rep. Bobbi Fiedler and her ex-aides recalled the day a slender, fair-skinned woman carrying a briefcase appeared in their fifth-floor office in Panorama City.

“After she spoke a few minutes, you could tell this was someone who was upset,” said Jerome, who worked for Fiedler before joining Gallegly’s staff. “She didn’t want to talk to anyone but Bobbi.”

When Fiedler ushered the visitor into her office, the woman handed her the briefcase, which contained the deed to her house and other personal papers, and said she planned to commit suicide. The Long Beach woman had never met Fiedler--she was not even from her district--but had seen her on television.

Fiedler talked with the woman for three hours until a psychiatric team arrived and took her to Olive View Medical Center.

Fiedler said: “There really is no limit to what can happen in casework.”

The most poignant sagas often involve the mentally ill.

Woman Pursued by Aliens

A woman in her mid-50s who lives in her car often visits Gallegly’s Chatsworth office. The woman maintains that “aliens are after me, and they’re looking at me through the air conditioning,” aide Carolyn Hall said. “She came in one day and said her foot was burning because they’d gotten to the accelerator of her car.”

The woman, who is well-versed in constitutional rights, often refuses assistance. But Hall said she has helped her obtain emergency government funds and has directed her to a homeless shelter. Gallegly’s office also scheduled an appointment for the woman with a county mental health organization.

Kay Van Horn, a Beilenson aide, developed a nearly six-year relationship with a former engineer who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and was homeless. She described him as “a sweet gentle man who was often delusional.”

He had arranged to have his disability checks sent to Beilenson’s Westside office and regularly exchanged letters with Van Horn.

Early last year, the man asked Van Horn for a Bible. She mailed one to him in Mexicali, where he was visiting friends. But it was returned with a notice that the homeless man had died of a severe blood disease and infection.

“My first thoughts on returning to Mexicali was that I was still a nut, but I was a nut with friends,” the man had said in his final letter. “I’ll be looking for the postman to bring me my Bible.”

Schiff, 30, is working on the case of a North Hollywood man who says he did not receive one of his monthly Social Security checks in 1980. Social Security records indicate the check was paid.

“He waited so long to ask about this check that the Treasury has destroyed it,” Schiff explains. “We’re at a real impasse. There’s a few cases like this where you’d like to take the $679 and pay him off and drop the issue. But you can’t.”

The man asks whether he can visit the Social Security office in New York City where the agency’s data banks are kept. Schiff paves the way for a meeting. “There’s nothing more you can do , “ he says.

Valley congressional staffs spend 60% to 70% of their time on casework. A total of 20 aides in Berman, Gallegly and Beilenson’s offices include 14 staffers who spend half or more of their time on casework, according to office estimates.

A lawmaker does not usually get personally involved in a constituent matter unless the staff hits a dead end or an agency refuses to respond when the government appears to be wrong. Their clout stems from Congress’ power to approve or deny the budget requests of federal agencies.

Berman’s Panorama City office has handled 1,077 cases this year, 624 of which have been resolved, Schiff said. A case is defined as a constituent problem with the government that requires an inquiry and follow-up.

Gallegly’s offices in Chatsworth and Thousand Oaks have worked on 1,171 cases, and 770 have been wrapped up, administrative assistant Mike Sedell said. Beilenson’s Tarzana and Westside offices have handled about 978 cases, and 728 have been resolved, said Joan Shaffran-Brandt, Beilenson’s press and legislative aide.

IRS Is Toughest Challenge

Aides from every congressional staff agree that the IRS poses the toughest challenge of any federal agency.

Hatfield of Beilenson’s office described IRS officials as a breed apart.

“You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” she said. “I don’t know if they’re that way before they join or they get that way on the job.”

“They are like junkyard dogs,” said Paul Clarke, Fiedler’s ex-chief aide and now her husband. “They will go after anybody’s bank account at any time, and many times they are absolutely mistaken.”

He said Fiedler’s office had to intervene more than once “to save somebody’s house from being sold at auction when there was a mistake” in an IRS matter.

Not all cases involve those who are down and out.

Schiff recalled helping a woman obtain a smog certificate so she could import her Rolls-Royce from Europe.

Others have been known to seek preferential treatment as well.

“Most of the constituents call and say they’re a very close friend of Howard Berman’s,” administrative assistant Litchman said. “The smart ones call and say, ‘Is Howard there?’ ”

Schiff calls a Sun Valley man who filed a workers’ compensation claim against the federal government in August, 1986. The 37-year-old ex-postal employee said that mistreatment by his supervisor had caused him emotional stress leading to physical ailments.

The Department of Labor denied the claim last July. But, working with Schiff, the man appealed, using more recent medical records.

Schiff has just learned that the man won the appeal and will receive 70% of his gross salary tax-free until he is able to work again.

“I know it’s been a long time,” Schiff tells the man. “Go celebrate.”

Then he closes one constituent’s manila folder for the last time.