SSA needs to fix its broken system with new digital services

Ralph de Juliis of AFGE Council 220 explains the Social Security Administration needs third-party verification services badly.

In November 2021, a Tennessee mother drove 46 miles to drop off her adopted daughter’s birth certificate to correct an error on her Social Security card. Without any online option to verify her daughter’s identity online, she was forced to travel to her nearest Social Security field office, only to find that she then had to wait for hours to deposit the birth certificate in a drop box during a designated one-hour window. In 2021, this draconian way of doing business at the Social Security Administration is simply not good enough.

Even before the pandemic, outdated policies made it difficult to access Social Security services. Beneficiaries wasted an afternoon waiting in a crowded office to show documents in person. When the pandemic hit, rather than modernizing their services to make them easier to access, the agency forced beneficiaries to mail in sensitive documents. As a result, millions of Americans went for weeks if not months without drivers’ licenses or birth certificates with no idea when — or if — they’d ever get their documents back. Meanwhile, the agency pressured employees to come in simply to sift through the mountain of mail created by SSA’s stubbornness. We believe that this crisis of SSA’s own making could have been avoided if the agency simply joined the rest of us in the 21st century and modernized their third-party verification services.

Lawmakers and citizens alike are frustrated over this unnecessary scenario. During an April 2021 Senate Finance Committee hearing on SSA’s pandemic customer service, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said, “We can’t have people’s original documents flying around in the mail or putting them into a drop box and wondering when they will be returned.”

Just four months later, SSA’s inspector general reported dozens of field offices had mail backlogs because the agency has no procedures to measure mail flow or track the status of these unprocessed applications. One Social Security card center had 9,000 unprocessed original documents lying around. If SSA used third-party verification people wouldn’t have to show their documents in person or mail them in with no idea when they’ll return.

Rather than address this broken system, SSA has raced to bring employees back to the office with the sole purpose of opening and sorting mail. Yet during the past two years, SSA employees have gone above and beyond to continue delivering services in a remote setting. Thanks to the success of telework, the backlog of pending cases fell by 11% within the first five weeks.

Further, from December 2020 to July 2021, the average wait time for a call dropped from 30 minutes to just five minutes, despite the monthly number of total phone calls jumping from 2.7 million to 3.1 million. In April 2021, we stated that “AFGE’s members are proud of their success in maintaining operations throughout the pandemic. They have continued to serve the public and work down the backlog of cases in claims and appeals.”

By interrupting our work to sift through mail, SSA will create a domino effect that will harm every measure of service we provide. We need to eliminate the mail backlog, but we cannot go back to the way things were pre-pandemic.

Other companies and agencies have used technology to better serve clients in the pandemic, reimagining a digital approach to services. The Department of Agriculture employed third-party verification as early as August 2019 to make the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) easier to use for applicants and recipients. This gave the USDA flexibility to let customers verify their identity online and avoid an in-person visit to a local USDA office in the pandemic. In the private sector, healthcare providers shifted services online using telehealth. From 2019 to 2020, telehealth Medicare visits increased from 840,000 to 52.7 million, depicting how providers found a way to offer safe, accessible services to patients. American taxpayers deserve better, if not the best, from their own government services.

In December 2021, President Biden issued an Executive Order challenging the federal government to update and improve its customer service. Bringing SSA’s third-party verification services online seemed like a natural fit. In the days after, we reached out to SSA leadership to find out what policy changes they planned to make in response to this order yet received minimal response. Now with a tentative plan to return to the office, we have no understanding if the agency is serious about improving their customer service or simply going back to the way things were.

At the end of the day, SSA needs to make it easier to access its services. Even after the pandemic ends, people shouldn’t be forced to spend hours doing something they could do online in minutes. The agency must invest in real solutions, using technology in a way that benefits the American people. That means using technology like third-party verification to quickly deliver the services people need to go about their lives.

Ralph de Juliis is president of AFGE Council 220, which represents over 26,000 Social Security field office and teleservice center employees.

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