January is usually a tough month for the Social Security Administration. There's a bit of hangover of work that didn't get done during the holidays but, more important, there's an increased workload because of the number of people who retire at the end of a calendar year and because SSA-1099s go out in January and their receipt occasions calls, not to mention those who call because they didn't receive an SSA-1099. All of this is still happening in January 2022 but Social Security faces more service delivery obstacles than usual. We still lack an appropriation for FY 2022 so the agency has little money to spend on overtime and the Omicron variant is causing a lot of employees absenteeism. All of this put together is a perfect storm that is causing horrific problems for anyone trying to do business with Social Security's field offices and teleservice centers. It's also likely to lead to little regular work getting done at the payment centers which get called upon to help the teleservice centers when they can't answer their phones.
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For what it’s worth, there are at least 1300 new FO employees in the pipeline. We know this takes a long time to get these people up to full speed, but it’s coming. Unfortunately this isn’t a net positive of personnel, we are still making up for attrition and early out. The ripple effect is that there has not been replacements to those who took early out in management and CO/RO spots. Lots of institutional knowledge out the door.
increase overtime big time and fund the overtime for serving the public instead of doing work to throw people off disability..
also hire more.. so many people have retired.
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