Feb 21, 2021

Social Security’s Ombudsman At Work

     Social Security's inability to translate Japanese marriage certificate delays widow's benefits nearly a year. Want to guess how she finally got action at Social Security?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The media, of course! As you said, the new Ombudsman for SSA. The news... *eye roll*.

Anonymous said...

There are measures during Covid that allowed for this woman to be paid timely but apparently they weren't followed. Most offices would have seen that they were followed as the claim aged and aged.

Anonymous said...

This is a disgrace. They need to replace Grace Kim and Erik Jones. They do not care about customer service. They wanted to hide the direct telephone numbers to the local field offices. When you call the local office, you are not allowed to talk to the employee who took your application. They refused to give you the Claims Specialists' direct extensions. I call to check on my clients' pending applications. Why can't I call their direct extensions, talk to the employee who handled the claim and get the status? And they whined about being overwhelmed and the wait time to the general line is longer? Use your head! The field offices are closed and you can't talk to the right persons after being placed on hold for several minutes. No wonder the customer satisfaction rate is way down!

Anonymous said...

@1011 If you are calling about disability claims, the claims rep is not going to know a whole lot about what is going on at DDS. If they have a mySSA account, they can sign into that to check the status.
Claims specialists should give out their extension to claimants that file and have a claim pending with them. Some claims specialists have up to 200 claims pending (internet unit). Not sure why those that answer the phone can't just say "it's still at DDS."

Anonymous said...

Guidance for RSI benefits are to pay based on allegation and seek proofs, unless fraud is suspected.

Some Claims Specialist is not reading their EMs. It's been a part of EM 20010 (the big COVID procedure EM) for about five or six revisions now.