In a move that one congressional staff member calls “absolutely devastating” to senior citizens and the poor, the Social Security Administration is planning to eliminate some walk-in office services.
In a letter sent to employee union officials this month, the SSA announced that as of April 1, it will no longer provide benefit verification letters to citizens at its local offices or Social Security number print-outs, which can be used as temporary identification while people wait to replace a lost or misplaced Social Security card.
10 comments:
I love it. The politicians mess with our budget and we mess with service delivery. Good job management.
The manager read a prepared 'script' to us that gave rationale for the decision. I actually thought there were some good points. One is that our main mission is to take claims and issue Social Security cards. And, like everywhere else, SSA wants the public to do more of their business online. Benefit verifications can be printed by anyone who has a My SSA account or one can be mailed by calling the TSC. Employers can use eVerify to obtain proof of a Social Security number or a replacement card can be issued. True, only those with a My SSA account can get instant response and everyone else will have to wait a week or so for the Post Office to deliver what they need. The union is up in arms about it. They say it is bad public service but it also reduces the need for employee time.
There will be some unhappy people, but absolutely devastating? Overly dramatic description. Inconvenient, yes.
I work in a field office and I applaud the move! Do you really want to pay someone $40 an hour to hand out Beve's and SSN print outs (which are a security risk anyway)?
Plus, it just encourages bad behaviors. We have a lot of folks who come in several times a month, every month, for benefit verifications. SSA makes it so easy for them that they have no incentive whatsoever to take care of documents. Well, I guess they'll learn now or will just loose their welfare benefits.
I expect some offices will use the coming self-help PC kiosks to help with this workload (i.e. help the claimants register, then let them come in and print their own verifications in the waiting room).
With SSA as an agency expecting to loose 4,000 employees this year without being able to replace any of them, something has to be done. And, this is the beginning of it.
Next, look for workload transfers and work sharing between offices in different areas. It is coming, whether we want it or not.
In the end, though, management will cave (like they always do on anything political) and the "emergency exceptions" will make this announcement just lip service.
Workload sharing has been going on in my area for years. Redets, SSI overpayments, internet DIBs, among others, all are moved around among various offices depending on volume and available staffing. The PC kiosk was tried in the largest office in the area and was pulled because it was a failure--they had to have someone be available to assist the claimants and it was too inefficient.
Good point about paying people $ 40/hr to hand out benefit verifications, especially since CR's and management spend so much time at the front desk these days.
The main people hurt by this are homeless people who have no mail address and no effective internet access. Sometimes when they try to sign up for various emergency housing, welfare or other benefits, they are required to supply an SSA verification or statement of benefits. Some agencies literally turn them away without it. If the need is truly immediate, now they can go to the SSA field office and get such a statement the same day. After the change, they can't, unless exceptions are made for such vulnerable people.
As a FO employee I have no issue with the SSN printout change. Those should have been scrapped long ago. However I don't think the benefit verification change is good at all. Despite what the agency thinks, not everyone has a computer. (And even if you strong-arm every visitor into signing people up for MySSA, as management is wont to do these days, one requires a printer to actually produce the verification letter outside of SSA/libraries). Many homeless people lack a mailing address to reliably get their 800# verification in 5-7 days. As long as the "dire need" exception exists, FOs will still be giving out plenty of verification letters and that traffic won't stop.
I hope SSA is liberal with making exceptions for elderly/homeless and strict with not being a source for other folks (perfectly capable of DIY'ing) to be lazy and get a simple printout.
The article I read earlier today about these changes talked about laws that the State of Illinois passed that first (before being struck down as unconstitutional) prohibited use of E-verify, then made it onerous to do so.
I recently had the pleasure of going through and watching a manager actually do the E-verify process. It's kinda difficult, and if you are one of the lucky (many) few who are not immediately verified, the extra steps (I did not have to go through these, but I saw some of the beginnings on the E-verify pages that detailed what that would require) seem kinda complicated. But still, at the end of the day, I don't understand why it isn't more on employers to verify their employees...
You do realize housing agencies already have electronic access to verify benefits. It's been in place for several years.
The public keeps voting for people who cut our budget, yet they expect the same services...doesn't work that way.
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