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.
ReplyDeleteClick 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.
ReplyDeleteCharles, 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...