A television station in Denver presents the now all too familiar story of a disabled person becoming homeless because of delays in processing their Social Security disability claim. Here's a quote from the claimant's attorney:
"We had to re-fax the same paperwork six times over a period of about six months," the attorney explained. "But it's not just the faxing. It's calling, 'Did you receive the fax? No, we haven't received the fax,' Even my staff, when they call into the field office, they will wait on hold for sometimes an hour — if the call is even answered at all."
This isn't just happening in isolated cases. It happens all the time. How is this acceptable?
16 comments:
It’s not but as an agency we have been taking on water for too long …..and finally sinking. So many employees have left and so many more are taking jobs at other agencies. This agency needs a complete make over top to bottom. Example : we roll out a new timekeeping system to replace on that worked - down all week…still can’t access it. We used to do awards with nice plaques- now my coworker received and email certificate that they need to frame. Sometimes it’s the little things but this is just a small sampling of how bad we are….
I would settle for a few major tweaks to the Disability application process and attorney assignment procedure. SSA needs to reduce the needless complexity of the process. Hiring more staff makes the problem worse in the short-term, because it takes years for FO staff to become proficient. There had been a marked increase in human error at many field offices. These frequent mistakes also contribute to huge delays, and make representation of these claims far less efficient.
There really needs to be more automation of the process to reduce human error and time spent on medial data entry tasks. I realize competent IT upgrades are very difficult to implement for huge federal agencies, but this is only viable path I see going forward. The attorney assignment regulations are crazy complicated, and I have dealt with seemingly endless variations of errors that have cost our firm thousands in lost fees, or significantly delayed fees that require months of follow-up to obtain. Payment delays for claimants are also becoming more of a problem.
Here is an easy first step--require all top level managers at SSA to read Jennifer Pahlka's new book --"Re-coding America: why Government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better." It should not take 10 years to roll out new software, only for that software to make the process less efficient.
We are a hot mess. Starve the beast long enough and it eventually dies. We are quickly approaching the point of no return. Republicans wet dream. However, there is plenty of blame to go around because the current occupant of the WH is apathetic at best.
It’s not going to get any better with current leadership. We need more workers, so our Commissioner has (brilliantly) decided to institute a hiring “pause” and instead divert funds to trashy software projects, like the new 1970’s era timekeeping program that went life yesterday and promptly went kaput.
Speaking of unprocessed faxes, it seems unlikely SSA would lose 5 faxes. There may be a problem with that attorney's faxing process.
Also : It does not help processing speed of cases, when attorneys add comments to their fax such as "Please process this or our office will a mandamus". Threats are not helpful. Besides most SSA employees don't even know what a mandamus is.
I know what it is as I worked on a SSA mandamus project. But I still don't push those cases with the mandamus comments ahead of other cases. Cases are generally worked based upon age. Those who have waited the longest should have their cases processed first.
It's not acceptable at all (no buts).
@ 10:30 The current occupant of the WH does not hold the purse strings. He knows how the other sides agenda on SSA is . There's a futile fight there. It'd be "apathy" vs. a brick wall.
12:01 - isn't the hiring pause in anticipation of the funding issues the agency will be dealing with in FY 2024 and FY 2025 due to levels being frozen thanks to the debt ceiling deal? Is money for hiring truly being diverted elsewhere, or was that just an assumption on your part?
Either way, the "pause" is just adding fuel to a fire burning out of control.
He does not hold the purse strings but he holds everything else. He could make SSA an priority. He could appoint another acting who has real world experience. He could nominate a permanent, even though confirmation would probably be difficult. Instead he just let's it rot.
I think everyone underestimates the difference that quality leadership and motivated top level managers can make at the agency. Hiring more functionally useless lower level employees will not be enough. Internal procedural regulations need to be simplified/updated, and the current leadership is simply not interested in taking on a task of this magnitude.
@12:27
I can almost guarantee the attorney's faxing procedure is not the problem. I know, because I deal with this issue all the time. Our faxes all have electronic confirmations, and we seem to only have problems with SSA Field Offices. For example, at one FO, if a particular case worker is assigned to the claim for post-med approval processing, I know I will have to follow up with the FO manager to get any type of timely response (I now have his personal email). I had a case held up for 8 months post-approval due to this individual refusing to process the claim. We confirmed all of our faxes had been received with other employees at the FO.
I also just dealt with a case where our firm's fee was improperly paid to another firm that had no role in the application our firm filed. The FO kept the prior rep on record from a prior application, and refused to process the attorney discharge letter that we faxed multiple times and attached to the online Recon appeal. Our firm received attorney acknowledgment letters from the FO well before the approval, but we were never set up for direct payment, and were not copied on the Notice of Award. The entire fee went to a national rep that literally contributed nothing to the claim. I am still dealing with this issue 4 months later, and will likely need to share our fee with this firm, because the FO manager does not understand how to apply POM regulations for attorney assignment.
Hiring pause must be just certain components.
anon@9:10am,
Though I pretty much agree with your sentiments, the time system thing actually isn't SSA's baby.
Instead, that abortion of a timekeeping system was actually designed and created by the Department of the Interior (the agency that SSA has contracted out to handle its timekeeping and payroll). They created that mess, not SSA.
If SSA had created it, it would have been ten times as bad as it is (at least, if judged against SSA's demonstrated lack of talent in creating its own systems).
Lost my original documents that I had to send in during the pandemic, twice. Never did get them back. Time to wipe it out and start it over as something new, it is too broken to ever be fixed.
The system that SSA now uses to receive faxes is a pain. It converts the documents to electronic documents. However, those documents have to be "profiled" (basically, SSNs added and the pages manually separated into separate forms and documents) and then assigned to someone to work.
Since the system was designed by morons who don't have to actually have to use it (i.e. it is of course a SSA self-designed and self-implemented system), it is slow, prone to not working, and has very poor tools provided to profile documents. You often spend up to 1/4 of the time to required to profile a document watching a web browser window with a spinning icon just waiting for the document image to display so you can figure out what to do with it. And, significant numbers of documents won't have SSNs or BCN numbers on them, so you then have to spend time trawling through SSA's other stupid abortions of systems like WAC and eRPS to find an SSN to associate it with.
The profiling process itself ends up being extremely slow and arduous - doing 20+ documents can take an hour or more out of your day, depending on the size of the faxed documents and how well the system might be working. And, as documents are received in the office via mail, window, or drop box, they have to be manually scanned into the same system (using equipment that seems to always be on the ragged edge of dying, as management is always strangely and seriously adverse to getting it serviced until it just totally quits. Our networked photocopier always sounds like it has stripped belts, and it sometimes takes 4-5 attempts to successfully scan a document that has been folded). Thus, the number of documents to be profiled by the poor saps designated by management to do the profiling keep piling up.
In large offices, I'll bet that there are huge numbers of unprofiled documents in that queue folder. I mean, they can't answer their phones or do their appointments due to lack of manpower, so I don't doubt that profiling and assigning documents in WorkTrack is something else nobody has time to do.
If it had been designed by competent people and used mission-critical infrastructure and equipment, it would actually be a useful system. However, competent is a term not really associated with SSA management. And, they are too cheap to shell out for mission critical equipment (I mean, doing so might cause management to, gasp, loose their travel money or limit their ability to blow supply money on irrelevant things which would be a real downer for them, apparently).
Clearly, the people making decisions aren't business people. When you have freezes on hiring more people, you need to find a way to get more productivity out of existing employees. One of those ways is giving them appropriate tools. Clearly. this is failure of leadership at the highest levels.
@ 2:34-
That's an odd complaint. I think most offices would say worktrack is a tremendous benefit. Confidently knowing what paperwork or faxes we have received is a positive game changer in my office. Staff appreciate it when on phones. They can easily tell a customer the actual status of a case in the hands of the FO rather than have to speculate or track down another employee to find out if something was received. Sure some documents are difficult to accurately profile due to lack of an SSN. However, that's a small percentage of cases really. Create a generic return coversheet that tells the customer we need their SSN or BNC with all mail or faxes and return what they sent in. Invest a little on the front end and actually expect something of our customers. You might be surprised they actually learn.
Beyond that we still have other tools to find the SSN. Sure some take more time than others.
I see zero chance worktrack is going away. I'd recommend finding positive solutions to maximize it's usage.
As for the system being down or slow, sure that also happens but in my area that's infrequent.
The overall additional time commitment is low. A good percentage of what we receive has to be saved electronically anyway. So, either it gets scanned in on the front end or the back end. The only significant net difference in the issue is who does the scanning and profiling. Management has been lobbying for clericals for some time. Who knows if that will ever come to fruition.
anon@7:49am,
2:34 here.
I'm not saying it is a bad idea for a system (it actually is not), just that its implementation is very poorly done and manpower inefficient. The fact that management is incapable of recognizing this just supports the fact that the agency is run by a group of ignorant morons who remain purposely and willfully ignorant.
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