From Forbes:
Last October, my mother walked into the family room of her rural North Carolina house and found my dad, her husband of nearly 60 years, sitting motionless in the recliner.
In the days that followed, as our family processed our shock and grief, we had to deal with some very practical issues, including money. As retirees, my parents had relied largely on their individual Social Security checks and his small pension to pay the bills. We assumed that, following my dad’s death, she could continue to draw income from those two sources. Plus, my mom had me—an estate and tax lawyer and journalist who has advised dozens of families and written extensively about Social Security—to help make sure the transition went smoothly.
Instead, it took five months, numerous phone calls, letters and faxes and help from my mom’s Congressman, to get all of the Social Security she was owed. Along the way, we got contradictory answers from the Social Security Administration (SSA) on the phone and conflicting letters in the mail, including one advising my mom to call a toll-free number that was disconnected.
We also saw Social Security payments appear and disappear from her bank account and began to fear that her health coverage might lapse too, since she was paying her Medicare premiums (as the majority of seniors do) through deductions from her Social Security check.Sadly, our experience was not all that unusual. Even as the number of Americans eligible for Social Security has been rising, the SSA has shed thousands of employees. After President Donald Trump set billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loose on the federal workforce in January 2025, more than 7,200 positions were eliminated. Additional cuts have left the agency with just 52,045 workers as of January, down almost 20% over the last decade. …
The article goes on to document all the problems caused by inadequate online systems and inadequate personnel. If even transactions like this which should be simple are so difficult, what is the public to do? You know that somewhere down the road when we have a truly independent Inspector General there will be report after report showing that huge numbers of people have been underpaid billions of dollars.
8 comments:
Charles, nothing is going to change until staffing levels are increased by at least 7,000.
Quit dreaming. They're not going to hire to later fire for AI.
We will see after the midterms.
I had to call my congressmen to get my issue taken care of, and it was an easier issue than what they experienced in this post. *shrug* Guess that's the times we are living in now with SSA.
The agency can afford to hire more frontline employees if they'd cut down on higher pay folks "managing" workloads. These people were everywhere at SSA, including OGC and the hearing component. After Bisignano took on IRS, whatever transformation was planned, seemed to slow under the SES and SES equivalents.
The agency was critically understaffed before it lost those 7000. Hiring 7000 would just be throwing fresh meat into the grinder at this point.
What's truly remarkable about this story is how the author, after all of this, still has no idea how the process works. SSA does not withdraw money from banks, the banks return the money to the Treasury. Widows are automatically converted and the lump sump paid without a new application if they were receiving spouse benefits on the deceased when they died, unless the survivor is under FRA in which case they would have to make an election for a reduced benefit. The survivor's benefit is never suspended because the widow claim is processing. When the survivor is on their own record and applies on their deceased spouse, it pays a combined benefit calculated from both.
The author touts the advantages of having a lawyer helping when talking about submitting a 561, not realizing that the suspension was for address which cannot be corrected by a 561 and they were just throwing more paperwork into the dumpster. Classic lawyer move.
The under-staffing at the agency means that nobody took the time to tell the author's mom that the bank returned her husband's payment, and likely hers or it got returned for another reason, which placed her benefit in address suspense. She may or may not have needed an application at all for the survivor benefit.
This was such a simple problem with such simple solutions that any T2 CS with half a brain and 5 minutes could have figured it out. Instead it took multiple calls, appointments, form submissions and two congressionals to resolve, which is a perfect illustration of why "do more with less" doesn't work. By getting rid of or hamstringing the people who actually do the work, they're just making more work, taking 5 minutes tasks and turning them into months long boondoggles.
The agency is trying to push the actual work onto the claimants and their paid representatives using online services, because costs and wait-times that happen off SSA's books don't count, and it's all about appearance over substance. Frank doesn't care how long you wait, so long as you're doing it somewhere else. And if you die waiting, even better. One more happy customer!
Problem is, that strategy relies on the public and their paid reps to actually know what they're doing, and they don't. A lot of people at SSA don't know either, or don't know enough, because there's too much to know. The person who wrote this article allegedly has been offering advice on Social Security for years, and yet is painfully ignorant on the subject.
The Social Security Administration needs two things to actually work as intended for the American people. Simplification, and funding. Both of which have to come from congress. Which means it's not going to happen, and the disabled and elderly can just go ahead and find a comfortable gutter to crawl into and die.
“ If even transactions like this which should be simple are so difficult…”
Nothing is simple at SSA. Everything is tedious and convoluted. Made worse by reduced staff.
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