A Cleveland television station reports on the problems that Social Security claimants have getting the agency to work on their cases in Ohio. Hint: It’s not just Ohio. It’s everywhere.
A Cleveland television station reports on the problems that Social Security claimants have getting the agency to work on their cases in Ohio. Hint: It’s not just Ohio. It’s everywhere.
11 comments:
The statement from SSA is pure gas lighting which senior SSA managers effectively use towards the public and employees. gibberish
The House can't even pick a speaker, let alone realizing that they're not appropriating enough money for the program... Don't @ me, @ Grover Norquist and Steve Bannon and the other architects of this chaos.
They could immediately clear a huge portion of the backlog at DDS by eliminating recon, which is something most claimants and their representatives want anyway. But they won’t do this, because they no longer have enough OHO legal staff to handle the cases, and refuse to take concrete steps to retain those that remain.
Removing the recon was tried in prototype state years back. It was then reverted and reinstated. A wild guess is that skipping right to a hearing buried OHO. I defer to attorneys on this. Just an FO wworker!
I can deal with recon, but sometimes DDS makes extra work for itself. For instance, they want the work report to break down the amount of time at each physical activity as if Walking and standing are separate activities. Some of the vocational detail adds nothing to the case. Then if it's favorable, they have to have a separate unit look at it again.
They could hire retired employees for part time work from home to clear backlogs and to process more complex cases. When they offered me part time it was 32 hours a week. Nope. But I'd do 15 or 20, and I bet most of my contemporaries would too.
I’m in Ohio. We just don’t have the staff to serve the people. It’s that simple. And whether you want to hear it or believe it, we could hire a lot of people but 1) half will quit when they experience the “culture” at SSA couples with unreasonable workloads and 2) the half that stay won’t be “helpful” for a minimum of 2-3 years.
I can’t wait until I’m eligible to retire. I am doing the best I can but I just can’t take the stress any longer. It’s just not worth the pay to ruin your health and feel so stressed you don’t even want to go home to your family.
Unless unemployment goes up, private wages go down, or the 13th amendment is repealed, the problem won’t get fixed. You’ve got too few new hires coming into a chaotic and overwhelming situation where they’re seeing long-term employees running for the door.
The Ohio DDS is and has been, a wreck of an agency that no one wants to touch. The director and his executive team are now isolated on the upper floor of a scaled down office building, when they’re even in the office. The disconnect between them and the adjudicators is huge. They keep running the same useless training classes that don’t come close to preparing employees on how to do their jobs. Supervisors grown accustomed to working from home direct all communication be done online, which isn’t helpful for new hires in such complicated jobs. The failure rate of trainee classes is regularly 30-50%, when probationaries are even told it takes 2-3 years to really get the job. So why then the large amount of failures? Is it because it’s federal money and there’s no oversight? Those that make it learn to rely on canned responses in order to barely keep up with the outrageous workload. Every required HR video I’ve ever watched was done while working on my caseload. Every union meeting reveals an angry and fearful group of people. And they even promoted the lady who was in charge of the training classes!
Oh yes! We have to ask how long someone walked, stood, kneeled, crouched, within a given day. Having to ask someone to break down each activity, in minutes if needed, for a job they did for a year over 4 years ago makes for a great conversation! And all of to eventually point to the decision they can still do another similar job.
as much as people don't want to hear this, we don't pay people enough. As a management person who has attempted to hire people recently, once offered the job we have some say "no" due to low salary.
Post a Comment