From a recent report by Social Security’s Office of Inspector General:
The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program provides monthly benefits to retired and disabled workers and their dependents as well as the survivors of deceased workers. In general, to be entitled to benefits, a child of a retired, disabled, or deceased worker must: 1) be unmarried; 2) be under age 18, a full-time elementary or secondary school student under age 19, or have become disabled before age 22; and 3) meet certain relationship and dependency requirements. Generally, an SSA employee may appropriately deny a claim when the employee properly completes all necessary actions and determines the applicant has not established the claimant meets the requirements to be entitled to child’s insurance benefits.
We reviewed a random sample of 100 claims from a population of 21,533 claims filed from January 2019 through July 2023 that SSA employees approved for benefits in July 2023 or earlier and a random sample of 100 claims from a population of 75,424 claims filed from January 2019 through July 2023 SSA employees did not approve for benefits as of July 2023.
Of the 96,957 claims in our review, we estimate SSA employees correctly denied 37,712 (39 percent) and incorrectly denied 24,555 (25 percent). As a result of employee errors, SSA did not pay these beneficiaries approximately $92.2 million in benefits and delayed paying these beneficiaries approximately $87.7 million in benefits to which they were entitled.
We could not conclude whether employees correctly denied the remaining 34,690 claims (36 percent). This includes an estimated 28,661 claims SSA employees denied before they appropriately completed all required actions; therefore, there was not enough information in SSA’s records to determine whether Agency employees appropriately denied the claims. …
This might be tough for the Commissioner. I don’t think it can be solved by laying off employees or intimidating them or demanding they work harder. It will take analysis of the difficulties in doing this work accurately, coming up with better workflow processes, coming up with better quality control processes and being honest with everyone about the workforce needed to do the job properly. The honesty part will be the hardest thing for this Administration. It’s easier to blame the “deep state” than to do the difficult work of governing.
14 comments:
This story deserves a persistent spotlight from Congress and advocates to hold agency leadership responsible for acting to fix the problem. The report indicates that SSA is wrongfully not paying many millions of dollars of benefits to tens of thousands of children. These are benefits that their parents paid taxes to qualify for. Will the agency leadership be satisfied with a 25% error rate that takes money away from children? Or will it step up and fix it?
He will fire OIG and install a chief of quality who will publish reports reporting on Frank’s heroic efforts
Or maybe SSA employees don't know the intricacies of the program like they claim to. That's a pathetic result that would result in termination in any other job.
This administration is not about governing but about chaos. The more the better.
The report highlights a long standing issue of missed entitleme ts largely related to misunderstanding or misuse of the agencies interlaced Title II and Title XVI application filing, protective filing, and open application policies.
Get rid of collateral estoppel
I would assume that the lack of knowledge is a function of improper training and not willful ignorance by the employees. Firing them only to replace them with new poorly trained employees won't fix that.
My guess is the new training that started 4-5 years ago is responsible. Moving everything online away from IVT has made it so much harder for my trainees. They used to enjoy the IVT classes, cool instructors that had games and interaction. Now this stuff on the computer all day alone with teams meetings from time to time just isn’t engaging and cover all the details. We spend way more time filling in gaps than before.
Or maybe the program is extremely complex and requires a level of skill to administer that can’t be acquired by an ignorant population and its government that are unwilling to pay more than poverty wages for the labor.
Can anyone identify the demographics of the employees who did their job in this sample accurately or if they made errors? Perhaps that is a piece of the puzzle. Knowing why and how people are hired or promoted is an indicator of success in a job.
There is no incentive for the people with the KSAs to do the work well and efficiently to stay in the jobs where this work is done. BAs top out at GS-9. Why would anyone who is good at that job stay at a 9 for more than a couple of years without moving on?
That's why you're being replaced by computers/AI. It will be great experiencing consistency when representing claimants.
It's hard for me to believe 25K kids claims were denied incorrectly. Occasionally I had to deny claims due to insufficient evidence that probably were eventually paid. Much rarer was a denial because the child wasn't eligible. It's astounding to me that so many were denied.
Typical to blame staff first. There's a balance to be struck with quantity and quality. Cut the experienced staff while workloads continue to rise, quality is going to decrease. Of course, training staff were among the first reassigned to the frontline hindering SSA's ability to train staff.
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