Mar 7, 2022

An Idea For Social Security

      From Government Executive:

The Internal Revenue Service announced a new Taxpayer Experience Office meant to shore up taxpayer service at the struggling agency on Friday. ...

The IRS says that the new office will work on all parts of "taxpayer transactions" across the IRS. ...

"The IRS is committed to customer experiences that meet taxpayers where they are, in the moments that matter most in people's lives and in a way that delivers the service that the public expects and deserves," said Chief Taxpayer Experience Officer Ken Corbin, who is also the commissioner of the Wage and Investment division.

The IRS is also grappling with how to do identity verification for online accounts. It recently announced it will pivot from private company ID.me, which uses biometrics, to General Services Administration's login.gov after this tax season.

     It would help if Social Security would be honest with itself and the public about the state of the service it provides. It would also help if the agency accepts the reality that personal service including in person service will be required forever. We are not in a transition to completely digital service at Social Security and never will be. Field offices and teleservice centers are never going away.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Charles, the people running this agency are more delusional than some of the worst mentally ill people you may have recently represented.

They aren't about to admit to anything, because to admit to something they'd actually have to know something. And, if it doesn't come up on a report that can be fed to them through a sippy cup, well that just ain't happening.

Anonymous said...

You won't see any SES'er telling the Hill in any formal/public way that SSA's budget is garbage and service will be similar until it gets a bigger check. Why? Because many of the Agency's "friends" in Congress also are very interested in not giving it any more money than it already gets and such a public callout would put them in a tough spot, which they would take out on said SES'ers in subsequent testimony on the Hill, onerous requests for information, etc. That's why it was objectively such a big deal when Astrue did just that on like day three on the job.