There are at least three problems with this report. First, there is zero reason to trust OIG. It no longer enjoys any independence. It doesn't report to the Commissioner but it does report to the White House. It is now clear that there can be no OIG reports at any agency which criticize the Administration. The release of such a critical report will be blocked and those who drafted it summarily fired. (Thank you, Supreme Court.) Second, the report admits that 25 million callers to Social Security became so frustrated by Social Security's answering system that they hung up. It didn't add these callers in to the phone answering metrics. If you do add them in you find out that they comprise a whopping 40% of calls to Social Security. That's a lot of frustrated callers. Third, many of the calls were handled by Interactive Voice Response (IVR) rather than a human. How effectively did IVR respond to requests for customer service? The agency reported a big jump in telephone calls this year. How much of that was due to failed IVR? Failed IVR also contributes to customer dissatisfaction.
Senator Warren is already accusing the Social Security of lying.
Yesterday, SSA employees received at least one (I got several) emails linking this audit and bragging about how it vindicates Frank etc. One email also makes sure to praise the "expert leadership of the Trump administration". This is about the first damn OIG report I've read where the language is like "Yeah the agency is perfect and isn't doing anything wrong". Super fishy.
ReplyDeleteThis report is not saying the agency is perfect. It explicitly notes that about 25 million callers ended their calls without receiving service, for a variety of reasons. How is that “perfect”?
DeleteWhat the report does say is that service metrics improved in FY25 compared to prior years, and that the data SSA provided to OIG was accurate. That’s very different from claiming nothing is wrong.
Comments like this diminish the real work leadership and teleservice representatives put in to achieve this measurable improvement.
Unfortunately, the report shows that the only improvement was the introduction of a callback feature. While it is better to have that option than to have to stay on hold, it doesn't really serve people faster. They still have to wait a few hours to be served...and if SSA doesn't get to calling them back by the end of the day, they will never get a callback. The average speed of answer is only better because SSA counts the people accepting callbacks as having a 0 ASA, which is not accurate: it takes several minutes to get to the point of making a callback request. I have the greatest respect for TSC staff (I wish they had better training and technology but neither is their fault) but the Commissioner hasn't found some magic way to serve more people with fewer staff. I don't think any Commissioner could.
DeleteOne thing to clarify: this isn’t a “new” way of counting. SSA has used the exact same ASA methodology since callbacks were first introduced, and we’ve never included callback wait time in that number.
DeleteBecause the math hasn’t changed, the year-over-year improvement is real. It’s fair to debate whether ASA is the best way to capture what callers actually experience, but it’s hard to argue the improvement isn’t there when you’re comparing results under the same rules.
Also, the agency did serve roughly 65% more callers than last year. That’s simply a massive increase, which OIG reviewed and verified is accurate, even while acknowledging that we still have a long way to go.
Click to call back is a normal feature in customer service and should have been employed by us years ago. That being said if you choose it YOU ARE STILL WAITING! This report is comparing apples to a bag of rocks.
ReplyDeleteOn Jan. 24, four days into his second term, President Trump fired the inspectors general (IGs) of 18 federal agencies. Of the IGs in cabinet-level agencies, only two—those in the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security—survived. The late-night firings, dubbed the “Friday night purge,” drew immediate and widespread criticism from media, civil society, and top Democratic lawmakers, who expressed concern over the ramifications for accountability, transparency, and ethics in the new administration.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
DeleteCharles, your math is a little off on the 25 million callers who hung up. See the handy pie chart in Figure B-1 in the report. A total of 26.4M callers either hung up ("abandoned") or got a busy signal; that's 28% of all callers, not 40%. Still, it's a lot of people!
ReplyDeleteI actually 'trust' this report pretty well and find it very helpful. The thing is that it's got stuff that both sides will tout - it confirms SSA's data are accurate, but also confirms that it's cherry-picked. To me what stands out, besides the 28% of all callers not getting served, are that even as ASA stayed under 15 minutes most of the year, the average wait time to get a callback never fell below 60 minutes (and for much of the year was more than double that), and people who chose to wait on hold waited an average of 50+ minutes most of the year.
Now if only we could get SSA (or even OIG) to keep publishing these metrics routinely going forward...
I find interesting the calls handled by automation chart. For FY 2024, all months had number of calls between .1 and .4 million. For all of FY 2025 no months are lower than 1.6 million.
ReplyDeleteIt's even more striking that in September of FY 2024, the number of calls was .1 million, which jumped to 1.9 million in October FY 2025. That was the following month, still under the Biden administration.
Clearly the jump in automation had nothing to do with the new administration.
Similarly, the average speed of answer chart shows the times were dropping already in FY 2024. So, the lower numbers in FY2025 simply continue a trend already occurring.
It's also interesting how none of the other charts compare FY 2024 numbers to the FY2025 numbers.
I think the report is probably accurate AND it shows some significant problems. If you take out the folks who accepted a callback option (who get averaged in as 0 even though it takes several minutes to get through the phone tree to request a callback) and just look at the people who declined a callback and waited on hold, they waited longer in most months of FY25 than in the same month the year before when callbacks weren't available. You can see that by comparing the yellow line in Fig 3 with Fig 4. So the only way they're improving on ASA is by encouraging people to accept callbacks and averaging those in as 0.
ReplyDeletePeople who did request callbacks waited 1 to 2.5 hours for them in FY25. I don't know if SSA has a goal for that metric, but there's certainly room for improvement.
Most concerning is what it says on p.6 of the report: "SSA cancels callback requests that are not completed by the end of the day and does not queue them for the next business day or any other day." So if someone requests a callback and SSA doesn't get to it, they are never getting a callback unless they call again. The report doesn't say how many people experience this--it's grouped in with the 25 million total who hang up, get a busy signal or "polite disconnect", or who don't pick up when SSA does call them back. But I bet it's a lot of people, especially those who call late in the day and request callbacks.
Now imagine if SSA treated initial claims appts this way - A national queue where your chance of getting called hovers around 80%. Seems like a great idea
DeleteI have worked for SSA for 40 years. SSA always misrepresents the truth re performance. Our office had terrible waiting times due in part to a lack of staff. This was when the public would go up to the kiosk, pull a number and wait. So they just changed it so the public waited in line for a long time until they got to a receptionist that took care of many things (zero waiting time) or referred to a CR. The people waited as long but the stats showed much less waiting time. The biggest difference was that they waited while standing, sometimes the line went outside the office, versus sitting in the lobby waiting. There were tricks for processing times as well.
ReplyDelete