Social Security’s Office of the Inspector General recently released its semiannual report to Congress and Inspector General Gail Ennis offered some new goals for the agency to achieve in administering Social Security’s disability program.
Although much of Ennis’ message to Congress focused on recent Social Security scams that are on the horizon that target American’s personal information, Ennis did outline ways how the agency could improve how it administers the disability program. Below is a summary of Ennis’ proposal on how to improve Social Security disability.
IMPROVE ADMINISTRATION OF THE DISABILITY PROGRAM
The Agency continues to face challenges with pending initial disability claims and pending hearings, as well as hearings processing times. While pending levels and hearings timeliness have improved in recent years, SSA has not achieved its average hearings processing time goal of 270 days. Average processing time for hearings increased 65 percent from 360 days in Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 to 595 days in FY 2018, but it improved to 506 days in FY 2019. Also, few Ticket-eligible beneficiaries used their Tickets for vocational or employment services. To improve administration of the disability program, we believe SSA needs to 1) implement and monitor its Compassionate and Responsive Service initiative, designed to improve timeliness and reduce the hearings backlog; 2) focus resources on capacity issues to better balance processing times and hearing office workloads. In addition, SSA should continue to create new opportunities for returning beneficiaries to work and ensure measurement of costs, savings, and effectiveness are part of the design of such initiatives. In FY 2019, we completed nine audits in this area and, as of October 2019, we have six reviews ongoing.
Another interesting part of the report indicated that Social Security’s workforce is going to need some replacements as Ennis noted the agency would likely be losing 10,000 of Social Security’s 61,000 total workforce to retirement within the next five years.
