Some highlights from the President's proposed administrative budget for the Social Security Administration:
- Office of Inspector General would get only about a 5% increase in its operating budget. The rest of Social Security would get about 10%.
- "The Budget includes an increase of $60 million for teleservice centers to reduce wait times by over 40 percent and substantially reduce busy rates from 15 percent to 3 percent."
- "Addressing Processing Center Backlogs. The Budget includes an increase of over $75 million for PCs to handle more work."
- "To address the large backlog of initial disability claims and the additional claims we expect to receive in FY 2024, the Budget expands processing capacity by increasing staffing at the DDS offices. As a result, we expect the DDSs to process over 400,000 more initial disability claims and over 200,000 more reconsiderations than in FY 2023."
- Average processing time for initial disability claims would go down from 220 days to 195 days.
- Average processing time for reconsideration disability claims would go down from 224 days to 193 days.
- Average processing time for hearings would go down from 475 days to 320 days.
And remember, this is only a proposal. Congress must act on it and Republicans are saying they want dramatic cuts in agency budgets.
6 comments:
I don’t get SSA’s desire to centralize work in places with higher locality pay over cheaper “rest of the US” offices.
@11:48: It’s hard to find large amounts of competent help even in areas with well-educated populations like those in which the centralized offices are typically located, and damned near impossible to find it in areas with lower cost of living. Remote work agreements are a painfully obvious solution to this problem, but the spineless bozos in HQ seem to be incapable of taking any action to implement this very simple and very obvious solution.
It's about control. Regional and state offices want PCs and TSCs right there under their thumb, and will not allow things like having Benefits Authorizers or Claim Authorizers even in the larger Field Offices, despite the few times it has happened (usually due to hardship transfers) they end up being magical force multipliers.
There's a case to be made against it on the integrity side, since a Claims Specialist and Claims Authorizer working in tandem could do far more damage, but the vast majority of the crooked employees we see are lone wolves so I don't buy it.
But, I also think SSA should tell CMS to foot the bill to put at least one of their own employees in each of at least the larger Level 1 Field Offices to handle complex Medicare issues. If we're handling half their enrollment work for them like we have been for decades it's the least they can do.
If wishes were fishes....
One of the main operation barriers for SSA hiring full-time telework ...is effectively training these new employees. SSA needs to improve their training program overall, but they really need to come with a viable training program for remote workers. Because from personal experience, new employees hired during the pandemic create more problems and delays with their constant mistakes.
The FO employees are not just overworked, they simply do not know how to complete the work. This does not just relate to complex tasks like workers comp offset calculations. We routinely get told our office are not appointment representatives, despite having an attorney acknowledgement letter or ERE access. I now have to instruct my own office staff to ask about RASR and basic regulations for attorney appointment (which are needlessly complex).
Many of the FO staff just blind transfer us to caseworkers that never answer the phone or return our calls. They make no attempt to answer extremely basic questions. It is almost as if they are hired simply to answer phones to meet some call wait time metric. A few weeks back, I had a FO employee try to provide answers. It was a 30 minute call for a case that was approved in August 2022 that is still was not in pay status. She set my client up for a rep payee interview that was not needed, for an appointment time that the FO does not block off for appointments...and there was no record that an appointment had been made when I spoke to the FO manager a week later. Turns out the case had already been sent to the payment center for processing a few weeks earlier.
I agree that remote work isn’t typically going to be feasible for most field office staff. But it’s workable for huge swathes of other positions within SSA, particularly for non-public facing employees. And as for training new staff, a little imagination and effort goes s long way. Companies and other agencies have been successfully training new hires for extremely complex and technical jobs for years now. No reason to believe a small cadre of (competent) staff couldn’t do the same at SSA.
Post a Comment