A Richmond, VA television station reports on a local case. SSI disability benefits were approved almost immediately for a child with a rare genetic disorder but the case has been sitting at the local Social Security field office for five months awaiting payment.
Undoubtedly, there's some complication. Anything complicated goes into the "Not now, not later, not ever" pile. They'll get to it when they have time but they never do. Why spend the time to complete action on one difficult case when you can easily process five uncomplicated cases in the same amount of time? Except that in this case they will because the case has been publicized.
Is this happening because the Social Security employees are lazy? No, they're just overwhelmed with work and they're judged based upon the raw number of cases they complete. There's constant pressure to produce numbers. The easiest way to produce numbers is to work on the easiest cases first and let the difficult cases pile up. It makes sense from the point of view of an individual employee or manager but it's a horribly unfair situation as I expect those employees and managers know.
By the way, when I say we're at the "Not now, not later, not ever" stage, I'm not exaggerating. I've got a fee petition pending at a payment center for more than three years. It's gathering dust because they're busy with other things, like answering Social Security's 800 number and the agency isn't tracking fee petitions. When are they ever going to be not so busy? It would take a major political change.
5 comments:
Live by the numbers, die by the numbers. Security Stat is only going to make it worse but it will look good on paper. We never have time to do it right but we always have time to do it over, eventually.
DDS is generally 2 yrs behind on initial claims because 2020 claims were not processed because COVID and office closures. Sounds like PERC is holding it up, and she could be resourced out by the GoFundMe they posted in this article, likely not realizing the consequences for the claim. This sucks, but 5 months is not long in this universe.
Thanks for recognizing this is an understaffing problem, period. Too much work, too few people to do the work.
SSA needs to hire about 15,000 more employees to bring us up to 2010 levels and to account for increased beneficiaries/claims. That's the scope of how great the problem is.
As much as people (republicans) complain about the cost of SSA, it is a well-run program when compared with private insurance. The administrative costs to run SSA are miniscule compared to private insurance programs.
We’ve forgotten about the people. And it is sad. And that is why morale is so bad. We signed up for this job to make a difference.
Most things sit because it is quantity and numerics around very specific workloads. Anything outside that just sits because no one has the time otherwise.
The COSS pushes “stats” and in return we are killing the little employee will we have . Every day it’s disability processing, phone answer rate , on loading more appointments, pay Rshi claims and on and on. The problem is I have 40% less staff and I’m being asked to do what I did when I had a full staff. The RZ targets are unreal - more than years past while certain work gathers dust. I say this with all sincerity- it’s a three alarm fire and we are using a garden hose to put the fire out.
My staff is all looking for other employment and the few that remain - ask for non existent OT. Charles should do a post from the go perspective to see the real state of affairs - it’s horrible.
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