SSAB on Ticket to Work

The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) has filed comments on SSA's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on the Ticket to Work program. The comments include this gloomy assessment of the current state of Ticket to Work:

After three years of operation, the participation rate in the Ticket program is very
low. The most recent available data shows that over 11 million tickets have been mailed, yet less than 1 percent of the eligible beneficiaries have actually assigned their ticket. Much work still needs to be done to entice a larger fraction of the remaining millions of beneficiaries to enroll in the program. We applaud SSA’s efforts over this past year to market the Ticket program to beneficiaries, employers and job placement organizations. However, it is clear that more beneficiaries need to access return-to-work services if the program will ever fulfill Congressional desire to facilitate self-sufficiency for a significant proportion of beneficiaries.

The marketplace does not seem to be responding either. The number of employment networks has declined over time. Experience to date shows that there are still financial disincentives for the ENs. Only 45 percent of approved ENs are actively engaged in providing services, and very few, if any, are actually making any money. The ENs state that it is too costly to provide the level of services that are truly required to return beneficiaries to the work place.