In one of her last acts as Acting Commissioner of Social Security, Kililo Kijakazi issued an apology for her confused testimony before a Congressional committee that badly understated her agency's problem with overpayments of benefits.
By the way, does anyone have an idea where Kijakazi is headed now? Back to a staff job? On to a new position?
20 comments:
This has been hashed repeatedly, but she has no clue as to what she's doing nor what she's speaking about. She just reads off scripts given to her by her underlings, who also likely don't understand what's going on other than numbers on a page. No real understanding of WHY overpayments happen, nor how to address sound changes in overpayment policy. Good riddance, hopefully she leaves the agency altogether.
She will be offered a do nothing advisor job
Lobbying would be the smart choice, more money, no responsibility, I am sure there is something out there for a former agency head, would be stupid to stay.
Tiger Team - where people are hidden from public eye so they can still have taxpayers paying them a salary to do nothing. SSA whines about budget but continues to waste money. Just ask the Regional Chief Judges and their management officer sidekicks who are scurrying around making last minute trips to hearing offices - even the Hearing office is wonder why they’re coming because they don’t even send an agenda. They have to spend the designated travel money or they might not get as much next year. Such a shame, but hey, free trip for upper management.
9:15 - nice cynicism, but no where close to the truth. Congressional testimony gets written by staff, vetted and revised by internal experts, aspects like word choice, tenor, tone and such debated and testimony rewritten, the COSS has preferences and a style that gets accommodated, the congressional and legislative affairs staff prepares briefing books with background and all facts are supported by documentation. There are scheduled practice sessions with Q and A practice.
LOL at 9:15. It cracks me up how many people like this have just no clue about how things work outside their FO. I hate to break it to you but the people who work on these briefings, get stats for executives etc are the actual experts. Just because you do it everyday doesn’t mean you are doing it right. Let’s not forgot, FO and PC staff are the reason we have overpayments in the first place.
The criticism is rich coming from people who have never briefed an executive, let alone anyone outside of their district cluster. If you were good enough to put this together you wouldn’t be in the FO.
I’m glad she is making the apology and the clarification to include SSI, but that committee has no jurisdiction over SSI so I can see why she didn’t discuss T16. The fact that everyone assumed SSI should have been included shows that you don’t consider anything outside of the narrow scope of FO work. All overpayments are not equal and all committees don’t have the authority to act on every piece of information. Not one member asked if this included SSI. Why? They are just as clueless. But don’t blame staff. People love to complain but nobody wants to go to HQ and take ok real responsibility to fix it.
1:17, that the apology was needed indicates there was some oversight or defect in the process you list out.
If people are going to tout the process and the experts that run the process, there also needs to be a bit of introspection when it falls short.
None of us are infallible, but what’s going to get more respect for someone claiming to be an expert is when a mistake is made, take the lump, learn from it, and do better next time.
ACOSS is taking the lump for her team, we’ll see if the new COSS learns anything from it & if his team does any better going forward.
Folks, if you ever wondered whether the people out in HQ are actually as pompous, out of touch, and deranged as they seem, just re-read that comment right above this one. What a horse’s a$$.
@8:14 am — the idea that anyone would parse out these numbers for a Congressional hearing is ridiculous. Of course SSI should have been included and of course she should have issued the clarification. What she messaged looked inept if not outright deceptive. And any good hearing prep would have recommended she be forthright and upfront since many OPs are baked into the rules of the program — RMA, SBC, etc. It’s a tragic state for the agency and the fact that no one has reported on travel, parties, last minute appointments are all a sign no one is willing to speak up. This has been the worst era of the agency — looking forward to a new chapter.
@7:57am, exactly!!
HQ employees just think the are head and shoulders smarter than field employees. They think they can do no wrong and always have the correct answer. They think FO/PSC/TSC employees are just complete turds with stupid input and ideas. This exact sentiment is what the operations employees have been shouting for years, how out of touch HQ is with the reality on the ground, and the posts by 1:17 and 8:14 prove it. Just another day at SSA!
8:14 here again. I laugh every time HQ employees are called “out of touch.” I would happily put my programmatic knowledge up against any current FO employee. That’s how I got out of the FO, out of the ADO, out of the RO and into HQ. The difference is most HQ employees possess the technical knowledge of the FO as well as a secondary skill set that isn’t found in the FO. That’s mandatory for these positions. It’s easy to blame bad instructions or bad goals when you’ve never had to make them but just follow them your whole career. If you’ve never worked with another federal agency, responded to OLCA or DC level requests or White House rules, GAO frameworks or OPM regs, don’t criticize things outside your preview.
It’s harsh but I’m not wrong: HQ employees aren’t making OPs, getting case accuracy wrong, exceeding processing time goals. But until my last post, you won’t hear HQ criticizing you. So why does it always work in reverse? Of you can process payroll come do it. If you can write policy come do it. If you can brief Congress, come do it.
As far as leaving out the SSI numbers, if the ACOSS was called to testify to a committee overseeing technology development and she didn’t mention overpayments, would it be an issue? No, because that committee doesn’t oversee OP. Same with SSI. Ways and means has 0 jurisdiction over SSI. Did any members of the committee ask her about SSI? Did they ask for follow up about it in writing? No. Did any of you complaining know that ways and means doesn’t control SSI?
My point is before you criticize staff make sure you know what you are talking about and be sure you have a valid point. You won’t hear us say “wow, FO employees are just so out of touch with payment accuracy and that’s why OQR shows such high error rates” or “FO employees are so out of touch with proper payment rules and that’s why improper payments are trending upwards.” Give me a break, it is all the same team here. Could you imagine if DCs started saying “let’s just clean out the FO’s and start with more competent people who aren’t out of touch lifers who never read policy updates and start from scratch.”
How laughable. Of course it’s easy to show off technical knowledge of singular topics when you have all day to research and don’t have mentally disturbed clients to interview back to back to back. Have you forgot how little time there is to actually get to all the work? Or the mental fatigue of doing the grunt work day in day out. Plus let’s get real, most overpayments are caused by failure to report changes not someone screwing up an input or interpretation of policy. I’d argue most errors are due to lack of time and pressure from management. Nobody is ever rewarded for accuracy, only production. It’s artificial customer service. What’s actually been done fix things? Nobody is saying all HQ employees are trash it’s just really hard for us in the field to see what improvements have been made. Technology improvements? How much money has HQ wasted on horrible IT projects? Have you actually used the crap we use? Policy streamlining? I’d argue the job has only gotten more complicated. I challenge anyone to tell me one part of the job that has actually gotten easier in the FO or PC in the last 10 years. We certainly deserve our rating as the worst agency.
I'm in HQ, and, thankfully, I have not run into too many people as pompous as 8:14. Obviously there are some good HQ employees and some that are bad. A big problem is the ones with most seniority have been out of the field for many years. The FO today does not resemble in any way what it did in the 90's. Many cannot imagine that we have a turnover crisis. The work in FOs is undignified. The best employees I knew back at my old FO have left the agency entirely because of it. Everything at HQ should be centered around saving time for the FOs, but sadly, it is not. Plenty of hand-wringing about errors when there is not nearly enough time to get everything right, much less document everything. It certainly won't get any better with self-important a-holes like 8:14 in charge. My hope for O'Malley is that he can see through the butt kissers and people like 8:14 to the people who are realistic and want to fix things.
I got a call from someone at HQ 10 years ago asking why we don't do MDWs on everyone who comes into the office. You need a claim online or at least an MBR to do that. Maybe things have changed since then but it seemed like an idiotic question at the time.
RO wasn't much better. They frequently interpreted policy in ways that made no sense. I stopped asking for their opinion. I could do as well reading and interpreting.
Here is the thing. The people in FO’s think HQ employees are out of touch and that’s why things are so bad. The reality is , nobody at HQ is out of touch, the issue is people at HQ don’t have false hope that things can be fixed. Calling HQ out of touch is a coping mechanism and it helps make reality easier. Blame HQ for the FO misery.
Here is the reality of O’Malley. Nothing will change. He wants to visit and talk to employees? How novel. The only time I met Saul or the departing ACOSS was on their little RO world tours. A way for employees to send in suggestions? lol. That has been instituted and cancelled at least twice since I started with SSA. O’Malley has no clue. He talks about wanting to track thing with data. Does he know OARO literally had a division that tracks literally everything and provides data for reports, modeling etc? Not new. He wants to institute automation to identify fraud claims from the beginning. Surprise, this already exists. He wants to share information about what’s happening with the public? A HUGE percent of SSA’s work cannot be disclosed. It would literally require changes to the social security act. He wants SSA to share data with other agencies? Will never happen. It’s illegal. In fact, some components of SSA can’t even share data with other components of SSA because of privacy and tax law. He wants to speed up DDS decisions and retain staff? Those are state jobs. Let’s see him convince governors to go along with that. Will never happen.
He said what people want to hear to make him seem like he isn’t “out of touch” like those at HQ. The problem is unless he can change training, and but bodies in the FO and keep them there, nothing will change and everyone will have to fall back on the out of touch opiate that gets people through the day.
Lady, you’re not helping your case here.
Let’s resolve all of this and require mandatory field experience or periodic immersion for all HQ employees — No one in HQ should be advocating for systems or policy without understanding how to operationalize it and meet the diverse and dynamic service delivery challenges in Miami and Maine while maintaining “national” standards, tools, and metrics.
@8:14 — it’s a shame these posts are anonymous, you need to go.. we don’t want you on our team.
8:14 here again. Looks like my point has been thoroughly made. Look how many FO staff got defensive and offended when someone criticizes their work. Ever think we feel the same way when we are constantly called “out of touch” just because there is an impediment in the way to providing the solution you want. See why we don’t like being called “underlings”? Many of us are attorneys, statisticians, research scientists, economists, writers, video producers, engineers, software developers and you act like we sit here and do nothing but make things worse. We are bound by laws and rules just like you are. It isn’t fair to blame the problems with us not knowing how things work. You are balancing work with your area or district goals, limited by policy. We are balancing policy and rules with extra-agency budgets, requirements and rules. Just keep that in mind before you reduce us. You don’t like it when I did that to you, we don’t like it either.
I think it's about time to shut this discussion down.
Merry Christmas!
Post a Comment