From The Impact of Covid-19 on Older Workers’ Employment and Social Security Spillovers by Gopi Shah Goda, Emilie Jackson, Lauren Hersch Nicholas and Sarah See Stith, a presentation given at a conference presented by the Retirement and Disability Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
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So, what happens when the pandemic is over?
Oh so it’s not lazy employees working from home? Isn’t that what you’ve been espousing article after article?
ReplyDeleteNot hard to understand. The reason for the decline in filings is FO/DO closures. Those walk-in SSI filings aren't clogging up the system.
ReplyDelete@ 6:21...nah, you act like poor folks don't own phones or have access to the internet...they do, by and large, and therefore can file claims through alternative means
ReplyDeleteThe real reason for the decline to that social service agencies across the country are no longer making their assistance contingent on filing an application. Without that "stick" many folks who otherwise would file claims don't feel incentivized to do so.
It’s not the “walk-in” filings at our office. We haven’t been able to do those in years due to lack of staffing.
ReplyDeleteI like the optimism of saying "when the pandemic is over." I think it is going to be around a while, at least a decade or so, the rest of the world hasnt been able to vaccinate at all, huge swaths of population are incubating the next variant.
ReplyDeleteI am not worried about a wave. The wfh people are so amazingly productive, they should be able to handle it without any OT, heck they dont even need as many people when they are so productive.
ReplyDelete8:14 SSA has relied on large amount of overtime for skilled front line technicians to handle workloads. This practice has gone on since I started working at SSA in 1980. Overtime is really more cost effective than it would be to hire, train, and pay new employees salary and benefits.
Without overtime, the SSA backlogs inevitably grow, whether the employees are working at home or in the office. It is simply impossible to handle the workloads without OT.
The reason the backlogs grew in early 2021 was because under Commissioner Saul's leadership overtime was suddenly cut to almost nothing in several vital locations such as PC7.
It is statistically interesting that the precipitous decline began in Nov/Dec of 2019, prior to the pandemic, though the fast drop off occurred in Mar/Apr when most states when into lock down. That would seem to indicate what we are seeing is an effect caused by multiple factors, which is interesting and definitely worth more analysis
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ReplyDeletePersonally I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that fewer claims for disability are filed. Taxpayers already have a high burden. Perhaps the drop off is among those who can get by without disability benefits.