Poor Budget Means Poor Performance

Some excerpts from the testimony of Richard Warsinskey, on behalf of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations and the Social Security Advocacy Group at last week's House Appropriations Committee hearing, with my comments bolded in brackets:

SSA is planning on replacing these losses of positions during the actual period of this Fiscal Year:

7 of 10 losses in Field Offices
1.2 to 1 losses in Teleservice Centers
2 for 5 losses in Payment Centers
1 of 2 losses in the Disability Determinations Services (DDSs) ...

For many years SSA has stated that it wants to improve the 800 Number services. The FY 2009 budget states that SSA plans to have a 10% busy rate for FY 2009 and an average of a 330-second answering time for a call [five and a half minutes to answer the phone on average on top of a 10% busy rate!] . ...

In FY 2006, the agency’s SSI accuracy rate with respect to overpayments was 92.1 percent with an error rate of 7.9 percent, which represented improper payments of $3.2 billion. This is a statistically significant difference from the FY 2005 error rate with respect to overpayments of 6.4%, which represented $2.5 billion in improper payments. SSA directly attributes this increase in the error rate to the reduction in the number of redeterminations conducted in FY 2006. [Lack of staff is leading to hundreds of millions of dollars of overpayments to claimants.]