Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a report recommending that Social Security adopt a long term service delivery plan and by long term they mean ten years.
I have heard this sort of recommendation before. I think it is nonsense. First of all, how do you make a long term plan when you have no idea what sort of appropriation you will have for the next fiscal year much less ten years from now? Second, even if you could predict your appropriation, how do you predict future information technology availability and public usage of that technology.?
The report is based upon a firm conviction that the public's usage of the internet will continue to soar indefinitely and that Social Security must plan for this. That is preposterous. At some point in the near future, internet usage is going to bump into hard barriers. A certain proportion of the population is illiterate or barely literate. There will always be limits on how much that group will use the internet. There are only so many hours in the day that the rest of us will spend on the internet. Internet use does not keep soaring forever.
I can tell you and any experienced field office employee at Social Security can tell you that Social Security is just too complicated and people are just too complicated to make the assumption that the agency's workload can ever be transferred to computers.
These "strategic plans", "five-year plans", "visions" have been in place forever. And they're about as successful as the old Soviet "five year plans". No one has any clue about future budgets, especially so now. Some cadre/task force/committee comes up with this pap and it's regularly ignored in the face of budgetary reality. The cadre members get awards and end up in OASIS, though. Good for them.
ReplyDeleteOIG is basically useless. They completely ignore referrals sent to them by the field office, but send us junk referrals from crackpots who are ticked at their neighbors, then they get credit for closing x-number of cases each year, and the taxpayers save nothing. So whatever they say about what the agency should be doing is pure garbage.
ReplyDeleteAgree with A5:48. OIG is a solution in search of a problem. Instead of auditing everything from CDRs to bathroom breaks, they should be investigating fraud, which is why they were created in the first place. Further, these folks aren't trained claims reps--thus they rely heavily on FO personnel for assistance in uncovering fraud to boost their own numbers and taking employees from their own work.
ReplyDeleteBefore I retired, I routinely assigned fraud referrals to be worked only after all other work was to be done--because if a case doesn't involve over X dollars in recovery or potential savings, the US Attorney won't touch it. Waste of time.
Doing your taxes also seems “too complicated” but we have TurboTax for that. Imagine “a rules-engine based application reminiscent of modern tax-preparation software applications; it is easy to learn, it checks for errors and guides endusers as to how to correct them, it suggests alternatives when available, and it makes sure that applicants provide all the data needed to make determinations and compute correct payment amounts.” See page 4 of http://ephraimfeig.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/social-security-2020-vision-and-strategy.pdf
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm sorry, as a developer at SSA, I can tell you that most of the workloads could absolutely be done automatically by software. I don't know how exactly field office employees would be qualified to say otherwise.
ReplyDeleteAnon 10:27
ReplyDeletePerhaps you should request a temporary assignment, a developmental detail, to a field office and work as a service rep for sixty days before you tell the field office employees that they aren't qualified to make observations about their job duties. You tell the undereducated and illiterate and non-English speaking public that all they need is better software. Automation is helpful. Having someone train the staff on using the software is even more helpful, but SSA does not provide the staff with sufficient time to become proficient in new programs. And there is often only teeny tiny number of employees who are proficient and they are not readily available to the user.
SSA has been sending automated notices for decades and I agree that they have improved. However, knowing as much as I know, trying to decipher some of those notices generated by some software program can be very difficult.
We already have programs that require an answer to questions that are just not available and we have to come up with 'workarounds' to get the program to properly follow policy. Remember policy is first. Systems are second.
Internet claims are here to stay. But it has been the observation of the field employees that a large percentage of internet claims are badly prepared, missing answers to questions, incorrect answers to questions, missing information. But who cares as long as the internet usage is up and we can let the computers screen everyone. After all, we all read all the disclaimers, we all are honest and forthcoming, and a computer can assess credibility the same as a person...
Before I retired, there was a huge rush to meet goals re: Internet usage--obviously to relieve staff of the claims, which is how is was conveyed to the poor schnooks. The opposite turned out to be the case, and a lot of errors get missed or overlooked. I was under such pressure to increase iclaims that I advised my AD that I would go outside of the office and wear a sandwich sign to promote this stuff. He, being the creep that he is, was not amused.
ReplyDeleteAutomated processes at SSA have led to claims representatives and service representatives who no longer know policy. Rather, they wait on the various claims intake systems to give them a "red line" indicating that something could be wrong with the data they input. Most field office employees learn the "work arounds" to essentially trick the system into moving forward. When I was a claims representative and later a service representative supervisor, I insisted that my employees "look it up in POMS" before even asking me for assistance. I wanted them to be familiar with not only the policy but the rationale behind the policy's development. Now we essentially have staff who could be replaced by trained monkeys as the notion of learning policy, regulations, or heaven forbid, the Social Security Act itself is archaic. Sure...a developer can state his/her perspective. However, all SSA employees know what they know. Yet, they can't begin to know how much they don't know. There are POMS references for a lot of scenarios that are not often encountered by field employees. As a result, when the scenarios do present themselves the employees are oblivious that there is a specific way to handle. It's really sad that we previously employed top scholars but now can only recruit from colleges/universities with minimal requirements to graduate.
ReplyDeleteexactly...even a great program can't fix: crap in = crap out.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, I dislike the instant negative response to the continued push increase internet applications or automate the application process. Yes, it's been done poorly before. However, that does not mean it can't be done. As noted above, the IRS tax code (MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more complicated than the relatively small Social Security Act language) is automated by quite a few different programs and companies. Put simply, SS applications can be automated...it takes work and people who know what they are doing, but it can be done. The best solution would be to hire an outside company to do it, then sell the product to the government. Will this ever happen? No. Should it? Yes.