This Isn’t Making Sense To Me

     From Federal News Network:

... While the Social Security Administration has been under pressure for not yet rolling out electronic signatures, the agency, which handles Medicare Part B enrollment applications on behalf of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is launching an online form to digitize what has been a completely paper-based process. 

“You either walk it into a field office, you fax it in or you mail it in, but ultimately there’s going to be paper involved, David Ellison, SSA’s lead for digital transformation, said last Friday in an ACT-IAC webinar. “Right now, that isn’t happening, with the exception of some fax traffic that we’re picking up.” 

With the pandemic disrupting paper processes, Ellison said SSA is quickly putting together an online form that with have anti-spam CAPTCHA features built-in. 

“It’s not like the old ones, where you look at a grid and you have to pick out the bicycles, and if you get it all wrong, and you have to do it again. With the modern versions, that’s all done in the background,” he said. 

By pushing its anti-fraud measures to the background, Ellison said SSA strikes a balance between providing a straightforward, easy-to-navigate experience for the public, but still keeping fraud measures in place. 

“If someone is misrepresenting themselves, we have a lot of data, like the phone number they’re calling in with. If that’s mismatching with something that we have stored in our back-end systems, because we have a relationship with this citizen, we can steer that caller to someone who maybe is going to handle a fraud scenario, but we want to do it more in the background. We don’t want to expose all the citizens to an uncomfortable experience,” Ellison said. “We’re very lucky right now that these platforms are evolving to collect all this data and to be able to pass it along to our back-end fraud systems. ...

     I don’t understand. Are they designing something to help claimants or to stop fraud? How much fraud could there be in signing up for Medicare Part B? Will they really be treating every case where someone is calling from their child’s phone as if it were possible fraud? 

     Maybe the agency ought to get over its electronic signature paranoia especially for instances that involve a low potential for fraud. It’s not like requiring “wet” signatures gives any real protection against fraud.