Statement of The Honorable Michael J. Astrue, Commissioner, Social Security Administration Testimony Before the Full Committee of the House Committee on Ways and Means April 23, 2008
Thank you for this
opportunity to update you on our efforts to improve our service to the American
public.
I would like to start with
Social Security’s front door, the field office. The past few years have
been tough for field offices. As overall agency employment dropped from 63,569
in 2003 to 60,206 at the end of 2007, field offices felt the effect of staffing
losses more intensely because so many of our activities mandated by law are performed
in our field offices.
As staffing fell, workload
burdens grew. The general population continued to grow, and it got older,
which meant more retirement applications and more disability applications. New
state laws aimed at illegal immigrants increased the number of people seeking
replacement Social Security cards. New federal statutes required claims
representatives, teleservice representatives, and other field staff to take on
complex and time-consuming new responsibilities in Medicare Part D. This year,
our field offices are processing additional requests for 1099s to help
taxpayers file for payments under the stimulus bill.
Our field offices do their
best, but simply cannot provide the level of service the public expects from
the Social Security Administration at recent levels of funding. This Committee
has recognized this problem and I would like to thank you for providing SSA
with the resources to better fulfill our responsibilities to the American
public. The 2008 appropriations was the first time that Congress has appropriated
at or above the President’s Budget request since 1993.
We are grateful to you for
your support, and it is helping our field offices and teleservice centers provide
improved service. We will use some of the extra funding to strengthen our
direct service operation with the hiring of 3,900 employees, 1,300 employees
more than the expected losses for this year. We are not going to be able to
meet our challenges by continuing to ask for more money to maintain the status
quo. Increases in personnel and infrastructure costs alone for the fiscal year
that starts this October will be at least $400 million.
To cope with rising
workloads and likely fiscal constraints, we have systematically reviewed the
information that we routinely request from or provide to the public. We
believe that if we can automate, reduce, or eliminate such information exchanges,
we can improve efficiency as well as the quality of our service and the morale
of our field employees. Our Ready Retirement Team has been leading this effort
by focusing on streamlining the retirement application process, a logical choice
because this past January the first of nearly 80 million baby boomers filed for
retirement.
This
team already has driven change by determining that retirees born in this
country may not need to provide their official birth certificate to prove their
age. Instead, if a retiree alleges a date of birth that satisfies our
authentication standards, we will accept the allegation. This simple change
will allow baby boomers to file more effortlessly over the Internet, telephone,
or in our offices, employing a more efficient process that will accelerate
payment of the first check. Furthermore, field employees will save time on a
significant number of claims each year.
The Ready Retirement Team
also has greatly improved the information available to people trying to decide
the right date for their retirement. As we will soon announce, we are planning
to provide people highly accurate on-line estimates of their monthly retirement
benefits, which we compute by using their actual earnings records. Our current
online estimators are difficult and time-consuming to use, and often fall short
on accuracy. The new version will be simple, easy-to-use, and highly accurate.
Our team worked hard with the technology and with privacy experts to ensure
that the negligible risks of inappropriate disclosure of personal information justify
the substantial benefits.
Although our electronic
services are usually ranked as the best of all federal agencies, my judgment is
they are far from good enough yet to deal with the imminent tsunami of baby
boomers’ claims. After broad consultation with experts and advocacy groups,
next month we will be unveiling our new website, which will eliminate some of
the visual clutter and be significantly easier for the public to navigate,
especially if they are reaching out to us for the first or second time.
Our improved website will introduce
the public to the next critical Ready Retirement initiative: a total overhaul
of our online retirement application. Our current online form was put up
quickly about 8 years ago. It is nowhere near best demonstrated practices, and
for most of this decade only about 10% of the public has chosen to apply for
retirement online.
In order to keep field
offices from being totally overwhelmed, we are going to need to drive that
online filing figure up from about 13% to 50% over the next 5 years. The Ready
Retirement Team has a September 27, 2008 deadline for the first step of a
two-step implementation, and it has already shown a terrific prototype to advocacy
groups, and the Social Security Advisory Board. We found that we could
eliminate or simplify the vast majority of the application questions, and that
we could use cues, links, streaming video, and other techniques from the best
financial services websites to give the public a friendlier, faster, and
simpler experience. We expect the current 45 minutes for the average online
retirement filing to drop to an average of 15 minutes.
The second step of the Ready
Retirement process requires modification of 39 separate COBOL-based systems and
will involve some additional improvements to the form itself. The key
improvement will be that our computers will automatically send the claim to
payment without the involvement of a claims representative. In the coming
years, this one change could free up enormous amounts of staff time.
A similar work-saver that we
recently implemented is iAppeals. As you know, State agencies, called Disability
Determination Services, decide disability claims on our behalf at the first two
levels of the adjudication process. Currently, to appeal an adverse Disability
Determination Services decision, the claimant or the claimant’s representative
fills out a paper form and sends it to a field office, where the staff manually
enters the appeal into a system.
iAppeals, which is now used
on a voluntary basis in about 10-15% of all cases, eliminates this unnecessary manual
work, reduces the likelihood of human error, and ends one source of delay that
contributes to backlogs. For these reasons, in the coming year, we will
propose a regulation that will require claimants’ representatives to use
iAppeals; the status quo will be available for unrepresented claimants.
We also are having a
separate intercomponent team study the waiting areas in our field offices to
improve both the efficiency of the office and the experience of the public. We
expect to roll out many changes in the next year that will improve seating,
layout, privacy, signage, and other small, but important, things that make
visiting a field office a better experience.
Last month, I authorized the
purchase of new intake kiosks for field offices that will provide a modern,
fast, and user-friendly tool for the public to register the reason for their
visit. These kiosks incorporate touch screen technology and are similar to
those many Americans use for airline travel. We are also piloting the use of
personal computers in the field office reception area to provide the public
with connectivity to the SSA Internet website. These personal computers
provide an option for those people who may not have access to a personal
computer, or may not have understood our e-service options, to transact their
business with us electronically.
We
are looking at using an unobtrusive slideshow presentation to remind people of
the documents they need in order to file a claim or receive a new or
replacement Social Security card. Those people who do not have the necessary
documentation with them can leave to get it and come back, or call a family
member to bring it to them, so that they will have a fully successful visit.
The slides will also provide information about our online and 800 number
services so visitors know there are alternatives to visiting a field office the
next time they need service.
Before I discuss our efforts
to improve our disability process, I want to mention that immigration initiatives
and demographic shifts have further strained some field offices with demands
for new and replacement Social Security cards. To ease this pressure, we have
moved to specialized card centers, mostly in densely populated and rapidly
growing urban areas. These centers allow us to provide faster, more efficient,
and more accurate service to the public. We are co-locating these new centers with
field offices because doing so is cost-efficient, provides more career ladder
opportunities to our employees, and most importantly, better serves the
public.
Now, I would like to turn to
the disability backlogs by starting with an update about our efforts to improve
the quality and speed of Disability Determination Services decision-making. In
a time of agency contraction, for most of this decade the Disability
Determination Services have suffered even deeper cuts than SSA. We have taken
steps to reverse this trend, and I am very pleased that the Disability
Determination Services will be able to replace all staff who have left or will
leave their agencies this year. This support is a key part of our effort
to bring the number of pending cases at the State level down below 500,000 for
the first time since 1999.
Additional resources are
vital, but must be accompanied by our commitment to work smarter. A valid
longstanding Disability Determination Services criticism of SSA is that our
medical listings do not provide enough detail and do not keep pace with medical
advances. In making disability determinations, SSA uses the Listing of
Impairments (the Listings) which describes impairments that are
considered severe enough to prevent a person from doing any substantial gainful
activity. Although the Listings are a critical factor in SSA’s
disability determination and have been used in millions of cases since their
initial development in 1955, I discovered last year that some of the important
listings had not been updated for decades. Updating the Listings on a
regular basis will allow disability adjudicators to resolve disability cases
more accurately and efficiently. We have already published several final Listing
regulations, and we have developed a schedule to ensure that we update all of our
medical listings at least every 5 years.
In
addition, we have made a special effort to provide guidance to decision-makers on
the rare diseases and conditions where we are most likely to delay decisions
and make mistakes. This new emphasis on rare diseases and conditions is an
important element of our effort to use computer technology to pull the straightforward
cases out of the queue and resolve them in an unprecedented brief period of
time. Our retrospective analyses indicate that a surprisingly high percentage
of these cases are either decided incorrectly or take an unusually long period
of time to adjudicate.
The
first piece of what will be a two-track fast-track system is now up and running
across the country. It is called QDD – for Quick Disability Determination –
and right now about 2.3 % of all new claims are being identified for QDD
processing, and over 96% of them are allowances. QDD allowances are being
decided in an average of 6 to 8 days. During the next several months, we
expect the proportion of cases being identified for fast tracking will increase
as we continue to make adjustments to, and test the limits of, the computer
model. These adjustments should not affect the processing time nor the
allowance rate for QDD cases.
We
are also getting close to piloting the second track, which we are calling
compassionate allowances. These are cases where the disease or condition is so
consistently devastating that we can presume that the claimant is disabled once
we confirm a valid diagnosis. By deciding more cases based on medical evidence
alone, we can reduce the number of claims that require further review.
Since
this is new territory, we do not know what the eventual mix of QDD and
compassionate allowance cases will be, but a reasonable guess is that by the
end of 2009, about 4 % of our claims will be fast-tracked. By the end of 2012,
that number could be 6% to 9 % of our claims. I stress, however, that right
now these numbers are best guesses and that we will not really know until we
have pushed this effort for a longer period of time.
We
have also extended nationwide the Request for Program Consultation, a Disability
Determination Services quality initiative that was incorporated into Disability
Service Improvement. As we are speeding up our processing of cases, it is
essential that we maintain our focus on accuracy. An institutionalized forum
for communication between Disability Determination Services and SSA on
problematic cases is an important part of that effort.
The
Request for Program Consultation provides an electronic forum to resolve
disagreements between the Disability Determination Services and our Office of
Quality Performance. These disagreements may involve, for instance, whether a
Disability Determination Services agency obtained appropriate documentation,
applied policy correctly, or decided the case accurately. The Request for
Program Consultation is a web-based application that is available to Disability
Determination Services nationwide. The Request for Program Consultation
website allows Disability Determination Services to submit requests
electronically and those requests appear instantaneously for review by the
Request for Program Consultation Team. The Request for Program Consultation Team
analyzes and resolves cases within seven days. Prior to this consultation
process, Disability Determination Services often waited several months for a
definitive resolution on complex cases. The Request for Program Consultation allows
us to gather data on each request and share it with all users so that they may
use that information to write better policy and make better decisions.
As we work to improve the
timeliness and quality of our disability determinations, we are also considering
longer-term systems improvement. We will be having important discussions with
State administrators in New Orleans next week to discuss a unified information
technology system to replace the current 54 separate COBOL-based systems that
are increasingly difficult to modify and expensive to maintain. A similar consolidation
effort collapsed in early 1999, but we have been working toward this goal for
nearly a year, and I am cautiously optimistic. If we can obtain a sufficient
degree of consensus with our partners in the States in the next few months, we
may move forward with this essential improvement provided we have sufficient
resources..
We are working on a new software
tool called eCAT (Electronic Case Analysis Tool) for use by disability
examiners. eCAT will prompt examiners about questions they should ask and
documentation that they need before making a disability determination. The initial
model for eCAT was developed by the Pennsylvania Disability Determination
Services. Unfortunately, eCAT was implemented prematurely as part of Disability
Service Improvement and failed miserably. The Virginia Disability
Determination Services is helping us refine eCAT so that we properly implement
a good concept. While eCAT will not be ready to pilot earlier than next year,
it offers the hope of using cutting-edge technology to make faster, more
accurate, and better-documented decisions.
I would like to now turn to
the hearings backlog. If you step back and look at the system as an economist
would, we have had, for many years, issues of allocation and distribution of
resources. The problem of allocation has been painfully clear – compared to 10
years ago we have about 176 % more disability cases. We have taken a big step
toward resolving that problem by bringing onboard the 175 additional administrative
law judges and additional staff to support them. If we can resolve space
issues, we will also bring on another 14 National Hearing Center judges this
year.
The resource distribution
problem is neither obvious nor is its cause clear to me. Nonetheless, when you
look at where we were a year ago, it is clear that there was a longstanding
imbalance in Office of Disability Adjudication and Review resources. In
particular, the Chicago and Atlanta regions were dramatically under-resourced
compared to the rest of the country. The hearing offices in many of the most
backlogged cities – such as Atlanta, Cleveland, and Detroit – were receiving
3-4 times as many filings per administrative law judge as offices in Southern
California and New England.
We have moved swiftly to
correct this problem. Where we can address it by changing jurisdictional lines
in adjacent locations, we have done so. As an example, our suburban Pittsburgh office now serves Youngstown and other parts of eastern Ohio to take some of
the burden off overloaded offices in Cleveland
and Columbus. For the same
reasons, we have reassigned responsibility for cases scheduled for video
hearings to less busy offices. At our site in Toledo, we have video hearing
capability, so that now administrative law judges in Boston assist the Toledo office with their video hearings.
Our new National Hearing
Center (NHC), which holds video hearings from a central location, also gives us
the capability to move cases quickly and flexibly to conduct video hearings in
the cities with the worst backlogs. Right now, our NHC administrative law
judges are focusing their efforts on the backlogs in Atlanta, Cleveland, and Detroit. We are planning to expand this NHC initiative as soon as we can and intend to
address the backlogs in Miami, Columbus, Indianapolis, and other cities where claimants
have been waiting the longest.
With the allocation of the
175 newly-hired administrative law judges, we have made equalizing resources a
priority even though we have received some criticism for doing so. We are
sending 10 to Ohio and just 1 to New England. That is not a regional bias – I
am from Boston myself – but a data-driven decision that recognizes that there
is a strong correlation between filings per administrative law judge and cases
pending.
We
have also received some criticism that we are not providing adequate support
staff for our administrative law judge corps. In my opinion, that is a fiction
designed to sidetrack some of our productivity initiatives. Since I began as
Commissioner, I have increased the number of support staff per ALJ from 4.1 to
4.4. The number of staff needed to support a disposition will change as we
fully implement the backlog plan, but at the moment that number is difficult to
project with any certainty. We know that automating many of our clerical
functions will reduce the amount of time spent by staff on more routine tasks,
and allow them to absorb additional workloads. We are also working to
standardize our business process, which should result in additional staff
efficiencies. We will continue to monitor the appropriate staff to ALJ ratio
as the new processes are implemented.
While we will still have a
handful of offices that will be under-resourced due to various barriers, such
as the cumbersome process for adding additional space, we are just months away
from no longer being able to offer resource issues as a defense to poor
productivity. It is time for everyone from senior management to the most
junior support staff to commit themselves to finding the best ways to work
together to make sure that nobody waits an inexcusable period of time for a
final decision on an appeal. Performance varies greatly from office to office,
and we are working toward having the least productive offices model themselves,
to the extent possible, after the more productive offices.
While waiting for the new administrative
law judges and support staff to be fully trained and productive, we have done
our best to attack the backlogs with a series of administrative and regulatory
changes that have slowed the increase in pending cases and slightly reduced
average processing times. We could have made even greater progress, but chose
instead to make the important commitment to clear out the most aged cases where
the claimant has waited 1,000 days or more for a hearing. I would like to take
a little time to explain why that decision is so critical.
For most of this decade, SSA
created rules and incentives focused solely on the most prominent metric for
measuring the backlog – total cases pending. As logical as this decision may
seem at first, if you think about it harder you will see that it creates a
perverse incentive to focus on the easiest cases and to set aside the difficult
ones. That is what happened until the start of the 2007 fiscal year, when we
had about 65,000 cases over 1,000 days old, some of which had been pending for
as long as 1,400 days.
Even though these
1,000-day-old cases generally take 5-6 times longer than new cases to resolve,
we set the goal of clearing them out by the end of the year. We came within
108 cases of that goal by the end of FY 2007, and I am happy to report that all
of those cases are now gone. From a moral perspective, we had to dedicate our
resources to clear out these cases because it is just wrong to let claimants
wait an unconscionable length of time in order to meet a hearing-pending goal.
We were not satisfied with
our initial success, and for FY 2008, we redefined our goal as cases 900 or
more days old. We had 135,000 of the newly-defined aged cases at the start of FY
2008. I am pleased to report that we are ahead of schedule for completing all
135,000 of these cases this year; we have already completed 63% of them. Our
intention is to reduce the tolerance level again in FY 2009, but I plan to wait
until September before doing so.
I know you recognize that our
ability to make continued progress with this workload in the next fiscal year
will depend greatly on our fiscal position. If we do not receive a timely
appropriation or must deal with the uncertainties and budget reductions created
by a continuing resolution of unknown duration, our task will be much more
difficult to accomplish.
Reduction of the aged cases
should also produce, later this calendar year, a real benefit for everyone who
is waiting. The aged cases represent a large percentage of the paper cases in
the system, and it is extraordinarily inefficient to run two complex hearing
office systems instead of one. What should give everybody on this Committee
hope for next year is that the paper cases should be substantially gone by the
end of the year – around the same time that most of
the new administrative law
judges are reaching full productivity. The convergence of these two events
means that we expect to hit the “tipping point” –where both total cases pending
and average processing time are declining– sometime in January or February of
next year, with the caveat that progress may be slow if we are still under a
continuing resolution.
We have other possible
improvements in the pipeline. In June, we expect to start a 6-month pilot
program with the National Organization of Social Security Claims
Representatives, an association primarily comprised of lawyers. In this pilot, we
are testing a program that will allow representatives to conduct video hearings
from their offices. This initiative should offer convenience and comfort for
many claimants, save time for attorneys, and cut down on our investment in bricks
and mortar, a cost which increases above the rate of inflation year after year.
We are planning on a test in
Michigan which will use the same type of case profiling mechanisms that we
used in our successful attorney-advisor and informal remand initiatives to look
at cases heading from the Disability Determination Services to Office of
Disability Adjudication and Review. Michigan is a "prototype" State
that does not have reconsideration, and we are looking at ways of providing a
quick screening tool to enhance the quality of the initial determinations.
What we learn from this screening activity may help us identify cases that can
be triaged at an earlier point in the appeals process.
We have started a pilot on
centralized processing of notices, which may sound dull, but in theory should
save an enormous amount of time for hearing office support staff that then can
be used for moving cases. Regardless of the success of this pilot, at a
minimum it will be an opportunity to make Office of Disability Adjudication and
Review notices more up-to-date, clear, and user- friendly.
We will continue to improve Office
of Disability Adjudication and Review’s basic electronic system. A new system
to help support staff ready files for hearing should be rolling out state-by-state
by the end of the year. We are working on systems that will improve docketing
and allow authenticated attorney representatives to access the records to check
files for such things as case status and evidentiary development. As I have
said before, there is no magic bullet answer, just a multitude of small
nitty-gritty improvements necessary to run a more efficient and compassionate
process for the American public.
Before I close, I feel
obligated to bring one aspect of last month’s Trustees’ Report to your
attention. Although the combined OASDI trust funds do not reach exhaustion
until 2041, the disability trust fund will be exhausted in 2025 under current
assumptions. Although that date is later than the 2019 trust fund exhaustion date
for Medicare Hospital Insurance, it is one more reason why Congress needs to
work together on a bipartisan basis with the administration to give younger
Americans reason to have confidence in the future of Social Security.
To conclude, we have made
slow and frustrating progress in fixing our service delivery problems, but we
are making progress, and I am grateful to each Member of this Committee for
your support. As I have laid out in this testimony, changes that will take
place between Labor Day and the end of the year – streamlined online filing, at
least 175 new administrative law judges picking up steam, and the full shift
from paper to electronic systems in Office of Disability Adjudication and
Review – should produce considerably more improvement next year. Operating
under a continuing resolution for a prolonged period of time would worsen a
situation already made difficult by years of increasing workloads and limited
resources. It is also essential that we receive the full President’s Budget
for FY 2009 in order to keep up with increasing workloads and meet our
commitment to eliminate the hearings backlog by the end of FY 2013. So I ask
for your timely support of the President’s budget.
Thank you for this
opportunity to lay out in detail our plans and progress, and I will be happy to
answer any questions you have.
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