From radio station KMA:
Iowa Congresswoman Cindy Axne says too many people are having issues with the Social Security Administration's hotline services. …
Axne says she's heard from hundreds of Iowans having difficulties with the hotline service.
"I've had Iowans tell me they've been on the phone for four hours," she said. "I had a gentleman tell me that, unfortunately, his wife passed away. He couldn't get the answers that he needed on what his social security would look like after his wife died. He ended up having to put in his income back to 1966 into the system. It took him so long to even figure out what would this look like for him."
Axne says no additional funding is required for Social Security to provide adequate hotline staffing.
"It doesn't cost us a dime," said Axne, "because they have a $5 billion annual budget, and 80,000-person staff. So, we just need to make sure they allocate to addressing folks during work hours." …
Actually, if Social Security had 80,000 employees, it could answer its telephones. Unfortunately, even though its budget is a lot more than $5 billion, it only has about 60,000 employees, almost all of whom are working from home. If you want better telephone service, it’s going to take more employees who cost more money but, first, members of Congress like Ms. Axne need to get past some of their illusions. Bad service at Social Security isn’t the result of laziness or poor management. It’s because of inadequate operating budgets.
4 comments:
"Bad service at Social Security isn’t the result of laziness or poor management."
Laziness is a Congresswoman throwing out inaccurate budget and personnel figures rather than spending 5 minutes on the internet to get the actual numbers.
There you go, Charles. Stay on message.
Yes management is bad--terrible in some places--and sure, there are the small percentage of jackal bad employees just like there are in any big outfit.
But a lot of the problems those things are contributing to would simply fade away if SSA only had a decent budget and had closer to 80k employees rather than the 60k mark it's been lucky to hit the last couple decades.
Field offices are drowning in phone calls right now, as more and more claimants call local offices instead of the 1-800 number. I can't rightly blame them (TSC employees are undertrained, understaffed and under constant time pressure), but it means for those of us working on workloads, we are constantly being told to drop what we are doing and answer phones.
You wonder why your case is taking so long to develop? Because I have to stop ten times to answer phone calls from other people about why their case is taking so long to develop.
Or answer the same questions about how to get a Social Security card, because the guidance on our website is horribly written and not useful at all.
Or explain the poorly worded, automatically generated notices sent out to claimants, which don't explain a single thing about their actual issue in anything approaching English.
Or research an overpayment, because we don't explain the cause of overpayments in letters to claimants, and our system (especially on T2 overpayments) doesn't automatically label why.
Cindy Axne proudly represents herself as "the most bipartisan person in Congress." What a useless, pointless goal. No wonder she issued such a stupid, uninformed take on this.
Actually, Axne has voted almost in unison with Nancy Pelosi... David Young was much better in many ways. His staff was much more helpful. Axne's staff didn't seem to care in the least...I couldn't print out the form needed for them to help me. When Senator Grassley's staff and Rep. Young's staff needed the similar form, they mailed me one. This was all before Covid, so they can't use that as an excuse. I think the notion that Democrats care more about the disabled is a bunk. Some clearly do. Some Republicans, like Senators Cotton and Paul, are clearly against the program. That might be due to higher payouts in parts of their states. But, overall, I think the disabled rank really low on what members of Congress care about. Axne is probably only reacting to complaints. As for the website, it is poorly done, at best. You basically need two devices just to get into it. The updates on your case are lacking, the forms are hard to use (especially if you need to work on it a little at a time). Mediocre, at best. Not user friendly for older and disabled people...
Post a Comment