Better But Not Good Enough

From Customer Waiting Times in the Social Security Administration's Field Offices, a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG):

... [W]e believe SSA [Social Security Administration] is focused on providing timely service to its customers—and, the majority of customers we interviewed agreed that SSA was successful in this goal. However, SSA faces many current and future challenges in maintaining and improving this level of service.

For example, a significant number of customers still waited more than 1 hour for service. Additionally, many others left SSA field offices before receiving service. Specifically, during the period March 1, 2009 through April 30, 2010 (the last 14 months of our audit period), about 3.1 million visitors waited more than 1 hour for service, and of those visitors, over 330,000 waited more than 2 hours. Further, in FY 2009, about 3.3 million visitors left a field office without receiving service. ...

To SSA’s credit, wait times improved during our audit period. During the first 14 months of our 21-month audit period, 7.5 percent of visitors waited more than 1 hour for service. In comparison, during the last 14 months of the audit period, the percentage of customers who waited more than 1 hour decreased to 6.1 percent. This improvement occurred despite an increase of over 1 million visitors. Additionally, the average visitor wait time for customers without appointments decreased from 21.8 minutes in FY 2009 to 20.1 minutes during the first 7 months of FY 2010.