Bill To Require Mailing Of Annual Earnings Statements Clears First Hurdle

     A bill that would require the Social Security Administration to resume mailing annual earnings statements has passed the House Social Security Subcommittee. This is a bipartisan bill that faces no opposition in the House.

Social Security Helps Minority Households Overcome Wealth Disadvantage

      From Alicia Munnell, published in Market Watch:

A forthcoming study by two of my colleagues, Wenliang Hou and Geoff Sanzenbacher, looks at retirement wealth by race. ...

The results are shown in the table below. Without Social Security, the wealth of white households was seven times that of black households and five times that of Hispanic households. Add in Social Security and the disparity for both black and Hispanic households is reduced to 2 to 1. 

 

The reason that Social Security has such a powerful effect is that the program is universal and its benefit formula is progressive. A universal program allows minority workers to build up credits as they move from job to job. This constancy differs from employer-sponsored retirement plans, where minorities often work for employers that do not provide coverage. A progressive benefit formula provides much higher benefits relative to earnings for low-wage workers than for their high-wage counterparts. Since blacks and Hispanics earn significantly less than white workers, they receive a much higher percentage of their preretirement earnings in Social Security benefits.  ...

Merry Christmas

DCPS Remains Problematic

     From a report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General:

SSA [Social Security Administration] is developing DCPS [Disability Case Processing System] as a common case processing system for the DDSs [Disability Determination Services]. The Agency expects DCPS to simplify system support and maintenance, improve the speed and quality of the disability process, and reduce the growth rate of infrastructure costs.

SSA is using an incremental approach to develop and deploy DCPS. In December 2016, the Agency released its first working software to three DDSs, enabling them to process certain disability cases in the new system. Since then, the Agency has developed and implemented new releases that have provided additional functionality and has made the system available to users in 31 DDSs.

In September 2019, SSA made DCPS available to 31 participating DDSs, that, on average, used DCPS to process approximately 7 percent of their workload. DDS Administrators reported gaps in functionality prevented them from increasing their use of DCPS. SSA’s goal is for the DDSs to transition from their existing case processing systems 9 to 12 months after the DDS deploys DCPS or between July and October 2020, whichever is later. In March 2019, SSA reported to Congress that product development would be completed in September 2019, as scheduled on the DCPS Road Map. SSA plans to continue developing DCPS beyond November2019, and it is unknown when DCPS will provide the functionality needed for a DDS to completely stop using its existing case processing system.

In September 2019, SSA estimated its DCPS costs through Fiscal Year 2022 would be approximately $178 million. However, the Agency still needs to develop functionality and implement DCPS in the remaining 21 DDSs. We could not conclude that SSA’s cost and schedule estimates for developing and implementing DCPS were reasonable because SSA had not determined when DDSs will have the functionality to process all their workloads in DCPS. Further, until DCPS has the functionality DDSs need to process all their workloads, the DDSs will need to continue using their existing systems, which—according to the Agency—cost approximately $31 million annually to operate and maintain. ...

Merry Christmas

Senators Object To Ending Telework

     From Government Executive:

A group of 44 Democratic senators on Monday urged Social Security Administration Commissioner Andrew Saul to reverse his decision to cancel telework for nearly 12,000 employees. ...

In a letter Monday, 44 Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., urged Saul to “reconsider” the decision to end the telework program.

“We understand that SSA’s new contract with the American Federation of Government Employees has just come into effect, and that this contract conferred some degree of discretion to SSA management to set new rules for teleworking,” the lawmakers wrote. “We do not believe, however, that this justifies management’s unilateral decision to rescind telework entirely for the 12,000 affected employees . . . We are concerned that SSA is not providing sufficient time for workers to alter their arrangements to account for this policy change.”

The senators wrote that while improving customer service for Social Security beneficiaries is a laudable goal, killing telework is not the way to go about it. ...

Merry Christmas

Artificial Intelligence Sought

     From a "Sources Sought" notice posted by the Social Security Administration:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is conducting market research/sources sought to help determine the availability and technical capability of qualified businesses providing an artificial intelligence interface that can provide customer service in a conversational manner. This is not a request for quotations or proposals, and we do not guarantee the issuance of a solicitation as a result of this notice.  We will use the information we obtained from this research for planning purposes only. ...

SSA needs to incorporate technology to supplement our first level customer support interactions with automated and intelligent self-serve options our customers expect. We want to go beyond a static FAQs knowledge base, and interact with customers in a conversational manner using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This technology should be capable of undergoing both supervised and unsupervised learning for continuously improving its support capability.

The technology should be able to remember actions and contextual details during conversations, and leverage the captured information for suitable responses to other users, as appropriate.

A suitable, user-friendly interface for business experts who will be involved in supervised learning is essential. The interface should allow the experts to define and refine business rules, responses and response patterns, for example.

The technology should include tools that allow testing of user inputs and intent as well as conversation flow.

The new technology cannot require extensive training for proficiency. It must provide flexibility in offering technicians with a broad range of skillsets the opportunity to successfully share and complete tasks for the public.

This technology should support seamless transition of conversation history of authenticated users across channels and sessions.

The technology should recognize when it has reached its limitations with customer support, and offer transferring the customer to a live agent.

The technology should provide appropriate administrative functions to manage users and access for testing, refinements and deployment. In addition, it should include a comprehensive analytics capability.

The technology must continue to give our customers the service they have come to expect to complete business with SSA accurately and quickly, at any time, in any location, and on any platform. ...