Last year, the average wait time when you called the Internal Revenue Service was 27 minutes. This year it's 4 minutes. How did the IRS do it? They got a big infusion of money because Congress finally realized that service at the IRS was completely unacceptable.
Social Security's telephone wait time is something like four times as long as for the IRS. How is that acceptable? When do things reach such an extreme state that Social Security gets an infusion of money?
Oh and I thought your theory on the issues at Social Security was telework. Not underfunding.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it’s always telework. Never mind that the 800 # agents should all be 100% telework and should have been long before the pandemic.
Delete@4:44
ReplyDeleteCongress and the public love to use telework as the scapegoat for SSA's problems. It's the low hanging fruit in the equation. But you are correct, underfunding (and subsequently understaffing) is SSA's main problem. Even if everyone is "forced back into the office," that doesn't mean that all phone calls will be answered and all walk-in claimants will be served. Whether in the office or teleworking, there are only so many operations employees working for SSA. Many days SSA employees are dragged into the office to literally take teleclaims or answer phones from their cubicle, and that's it. This takes me back to around 2010-2011 when SSA had 70k employees and 10-15 million LESS beneficiaries, there were days where employees had to FIND work to do, and they were in the office 5 days a week. Telework is the scapegoat, understaffing is the real issue.
Posters on this blog passionately hate ssa employees and believe they are lazy. I loved reading about clearlink and the ceos video. He claimed some of clear links employees didn’t logon for over a month including managers. These practices would not work in ssa for 1 day!!!
ReplyDeleteLogonimh on is one thing. Working is another.
DeleteOne day... an average CR couldn't even go 10 minutes without some OS popping them up asking where they are. Do you need "help" with that call etc.
ReplyDeleteBest advice don’t respond to the pop up. They will get the message
DeleteIRS have their telephone service back in the office, SSA has staff teleworking. Maybe something to that?
ReplyDeleteNot seeing your point. Doesn’t matter where you answer the phone from when you don’t have adequate staffing period.
DeleteCharles, why don't you just stop approving posts on the topic of telework until OPM and management does whatever they are going to do related to it. It is an asinine, repetitive argument on both sides that isn't going to be settled by the opinions of anyone posting here. Honestly, I'm tired of listening to all the meaningless squawking about it. What happens will happen, and those that don't like it will either live with it or leave.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I really don't think the IRS comparison means anything anyway in the long run. The red howler monkey caucus is insisting on rolling back the IRS funding increase as one of their non-negotiable planks for the upcoming debt ceiling scream-fests (i.e. they can't be called negotiations by anyone with a straight face, as both sides seem to just want to yell, scream, and otherwise jump up and down stamping their feet and throwing temper tantrums like unruly children, under threat of taking their ball and stomping off home in a snit).
And, as far as SSA funding is concerned, it doesn't matter how much extra money (if any) Congress gives the agency. The idiots running it will simply go out of their way to find ways to waste every penny of it on things totally unrelated to improving anything (at least, based upon the agency's past history, anyway).
Personally, I feel that people here better get used to the status quo and hope that we can even maintain that. I'm not holding my breath on that, though....
ReplyDelete3:23 Your attitude is too negative. SSA funding does indeed help.
Part of the reason we got into a hole at SSA was that overtime was severely cut for about a year in 2021-2022. Without Operations employees working on weekends, the backlogs increased. Now that we have funding for OT back, things are slowly improving.
As far as discussing telework : It's what many people are interested in. They want to comment on it. I see no need for Charles to censor the discussion as you suggest.
With nothing really happening the only way to get traffic on the blog is to post telework topics so everyone goes off, its metrics.
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