From the Spokesman-Review (registration required):
The first members of the huge baby boom generation are beginning to file applications for Social Security retirement benefits. Those not old enough to file for retirement are in their disability-prone years, and record numbers are applying for disability benefits at Social Security offices like the ones in Spokane and Coeur d'Alene.
However, while faced with these growing workloads, the SSA is being starved of the funding and front-line employees needed to provide the high level of service that American workers have paid for, expect and deserve. Both applicants and taxpayers are being seriously harmed.
Social Security will collect $150 billion more in taxes than it will pay out in benefits this year, so why isn't there enough money to properly run the programs? The reason is that the agency's annual administrative budget must be authorized as part of the Labor-Health and Human Services spending bill, and the president has vetoed the bill passed by Congress for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Eastern Washington's U.S. Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Doc Hastings are the only members of the state's congressional delegation who voted against the bill and to sustain the president's veto. The 435-member House was just two votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto. ...
Service deterioration affects access to service by telephone. It is getting much more difficult to get through on the agency's toll-free number, and more than half of the callers to SSA field offices now get a busy signal. It is projected in the upcoming year the Spokane District (Spokane and Coeur d' Alene) will be understaffed seven to eight bodies, and without the requested budget here in the Spokane/CDA area we will be impacted dramatically. Backlogs will occur and phones will go unanswered as other parts of the nation are already experiencing.
It's not just the numbers of staff that are the problem but also the experience level. Because of a lack of funding SSA was not able to "hire ahead" for the retirement wave of experienced employees. It takes three years to fully train a claims representative. The amount of knowledge that has walked out of the door in the past couple of years and that will walk out in the next couple is phenomenal! The sad thing is that if the hiring had kept pace the stress levels may have been less and more people may have worked longer before retiring.
ReplyDeleteThat is absolutely correct, and is an aspect that is going overlooked in all the coverage of the backlogs. In many ways, it is already too late for SSA to remedy the current problems--massive hiring must be done to rebuild the agency virtually from the ground up, which Congress has no inclination to do--it would mean admitting to a serious level of negligence and incompetence in overseeing the entire range of SSA programs.
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