Rotary Club learns about Social Security

Local lawyer Gilbert “Winky” Aucoin was the guest speaker at the January 17, 2016 Ville Platte Rotary Club meeting.
Aucoin has practiced law since 1972, and he worked with his late brother and fellow lawyer Preston Aucoin for 18 years.
“Working with my brother helped me a lot,” Aucoin added.
Aucoin said that as he started out in the legal business, he was unsure of what kind of lawyer he wanted to be. Aucoin soon came under the wing of another lawyer who helped him find a path in his career.
“He lost a lot of cases because he wouldn’t stop arguing,” Aucoin said. “Even if he won, he continued to argue.
“So I reached a point where I don’t think I want to argue anymore. Or maybe I want to argue differently. As my children grew, I thought, I can’t separate people anymore, I can’t separate families. I can’t do that.
Four years after he began practicing law, Aucoin started taking on Social Security Disability work.
“What made it interesting is that I didn’t know what I was doing,” Aucoin said. “And the reason I didn’t know what I was doing is because that is not something they taught us in law school.
“I believe they do it now, but they didn’t do it then.”
Aucoin said that he found his true purpose in the field of law when he realized he could help someone who could no longer work, and who had worked and put money into the system.
“That person thought that by going to the Social Security office and by applying for disability benefits, that they would automatically receive it or have a real good chance of getting it, and I found that a lot of people were not getting it,” Aucoin said. “Along with that, not only did I realize that the benefit was for the worker who could no longer work, but there was a benefit for his children under the age of 18, that there was a benefit if his children were disabled, that there was a benefit for his spouse, if she was helping him to take care of children under the age of 18, that there was a widow’s disability benefit, if in fact the worker had passed, and there was Medicare.”
He added, “I said, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of stuff.’”
Aucoin said that helping that one person prove their disability could help more than just that person.
In addition to helping people with Social Security Disability, Aucoin also helped individuals with Supplemental Security Income.
‘This was a program for poor people who were disabled,” Aucoin said. “There was a program before. It just had a different name.
“The states were in charge of Supplemental Security Income to help people who were disabled and had not worked and put in.”
Aucoin said the two programs, Social Security Disability and Supplemental Security Income, eventually became associated to bring uniformity to the process. Applications for both programs were available and processed at the Social Security office.
“At the same time, I realized that this might be somewhat difficult for people because they might not know what they want and they might not realize what is there,” Aucoin said.
He continued, “Disability is subject to review and check could be ceased (so there was a question of) what to do with cessation cases. I thought, ‘Wow, this is a whole bunch of rules and how are people going to navigate that? How are they doing to paddle that boat?’”
Aucoin then began to learn about things like dates of application, onset dates of disability, the date last ensured, administrative onset, exertion recurrences, non-exertion recurrences, combinations of impairments, listing of impairments, the five step test, transferable skills and age categories.
“This is pretty complicated,” Aucoin said. “A lot of things I learned, I learned them the hard way.”
Aucoin also came to know about how judges are involved in the Social Securty Administrative system is a little different.
“The social security judge judges the case, and he also or can be an advocate hearing the case, in other words Social Security does not send a lawyer employed by Social Security to visit with me or argue with me that points to me or law or et cetera. They don’t do that. The judge does that.”
Aucoin said the situations he found himself in as a social security lawyer contrasted with those he encountered in his early days as a lawyer
“It puts you in a unique position, perhaps when I was in my other work, it was me and Brent fussing and a third party, a judge, telling us to sit down and be quiet or you were right or you were wrong,” he said. “It was different. I realized that it meant hat you had to choose your words and your body language very, very carefully because the judge is like the lawyer for Social Security.”
Ville Platte Chamber of Commerce President William “Tojo” Ward was the guest speaker at the January 24, 2017 Rotary meeting. He spoke about his year as chamber president, his goals and objectives, economic development and projects Rotary and the Chamber can work on together.