SSA gets $30M from TMF for IT upgrades key to better customer service

The Social Security Administration is providing disability and retirement benefits to a record of 70 million Americans each year — more than one in every five people in the United States.

Despite its growing workload, SSA’s workforce is at a 50-year low, following a decade of budget cuts.

SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley is urging Congress for more funding to address a growing backlog of disability claims and provide a reasonable level of customer service.

Without the supplemental funds requested, SSA is looking at stopgap solutions, such as IT investments that will make its employees more productive and its services more accessible to customers.

“When President Biden asked me to come to Social Security, it was not because everything was going great,” O’Malley said Tuesday at a virtual event hosted by the Urban Institute. “It was because we had been pushed into a customer service crisis by what was effectively 10 years of staffing reductions imposed by Congress.”

To accelerate these tech upgrades, the Technology Modernization Fund is investing more than $30 million in IT projects meant to improve SSA’s customer experience.

The agency plans to spend $19.5 million of the TMF award on its transition to electronic signatures and launch an online document upload platform.

By 2028, the agency expects these investments could help cut its paper mail volume in half, and save the equivalent of 600 staff work years annually. SSA also expects it could save its customers 1.3 million hours of travel time.

The TMF is also awarding $9 million for SSA to modernize the way it sends notifications to beneficiaries.

The funding will go toward creating digital options for SSA customers to receive notifications, and simplifying the language SSA uses in its notices.

SSA sends hundreds of millions of notices each year to inform people about their benefits and required actions.

“Our notices need to provide clear, actionable information to the public in their preferred communication mode,” said Betsy Beaumon, SSA’s chief transformation officer, in a statement. “We’re excited to be using this funding to build better experiences and stronger relationships with millions of Americans.”

SSA plans to use another $1.9 million to further upgrade its Intelligent Medical Language Analysis Generation (IMAGEN) and National Case Processing System.

SSA, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, launched IMAGEN, a machine-learning tool that analyzes clinical text from disability applicants’ health records and identifies clinician content relevant to SSA’s disability determination process.

“IMAGEN takes a thousand pages of medical records, and the machine is able to tell the examiner there’s a medical listing described in these records on these 23 pages that you need to pay particular attention to,” O’Malley said.

O’Malley said SSA is making progress on some key metrics, thanks in part to its IT modernization efforts.

“Sometimes members of Congress will say, ‘Well, why don’t you just make up for the lack of staffing and IT budget?’ We could — in fact, the only thing that’s been keeping our nose above water is some enhancements in IT and automation,” he said.

The average wait time for the agency’s 1-800 phone line over the past 30 days is 11.3 minutes — a fraction of the 42-minute average wait time it saw in November 2023.

Over the past 18 weeks, SSA has been closing disability cases in its backlog at a faster rate than new cases coming into the agency.

The number of people applying for benefits online, O’Malley added, is “consistently growing.”

“The vision and the future architecture that we’re moving to, is that if you want to get your business done online, we have good ways for you to do that. If you want to come into a field office, our hope is that you can do so without having to come in three different times, and wait in line for an hour, an hour and a half,” O’Malley said.

Despite that progress, O’Malley said SSA still has a lot of improvements to make. Visiting a field office in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he met a woman who comes in every week to drop off her pay stubs, to prove she’s still eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

O’Malley said SSA’s vision is to make it easier for SSI recipients to report their income online, on a smartphone, rather than come into a field office.

“We can have a digital approach to what is now a huge administrative overhead for us, and a lot of work that we unnecessarily heap on poor people to take two busses in to report their earnings,” O’Malley said.

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