New Social Security Chief Promises Overpayment Clawback Fix

Service fix needs: O'Malley said Social Security Administration service levels are poor partly because agency staffers are making do with IBM computers from the 1980s, and because employee attrition is so bad that, in some states, about 85% of the workers who handle Social Security disability insurance benefits determinations are trainees.

O'Malley noted that a combination of understaffing and old technology hurt agency efforts to retain experienced employees at its call centers. "You can only image the sort of stress that people encounter on an underperforming system when people have been on hold for 45 minutes or an hour," he said. "Nobody's coming in pleasant."

O'Malley said one thing SSA needs to do is to improve its notices.

"We send out notices that look like the old Mad Libs, excepts that these are designed by mad lawyers over time," he said. "We can't blame our seniors when they receive the notices and they can't make sense of it. The only thing you can make sense of on some of our notices is that, if you don't understand it, you should call our 1-800 number and wait for 39 minutes."

The agency also needs to increase staffing levels and revamp its technology, he said.

He noted that Congress provides only about one-third of the information technology services funding for SSA that it provides for the Veterans Affairs Department.

"A lot of our so-called modernization efforts or simplification efforts are really about taking paper forms and turning them into online forms, which is not really simplification," he said.

SSA really needs to simplify its programs, not just its forms, he said.

Solvency: When senators asked O'Malley about the underlying solvency problems of the Social Security benefits trust funds, he said program actuaries have told him there are two main culprits.

One is the severity of the 2007-2009 Great Recession, he said.

Another, he said, is decisions policymakers made when revamping the program in 1982, five years before Congress enacted major tax system change legislation.

Because Congress capped the amount of earnings subject to Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, and because the 1987 tax rule changes sharply increased the share of income flowing to the very top earners, the percentage of earnings subject to payroll taxes dropped to 82%, from 90%, he said.

The Social Security trustees' report: The trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds issue closely watched reports every spring. The reports are due April 1.

The Social Security trustees' report will be a little late this year because of delays in getting Census data, but the report should be out within about 30 days, O'Malley said.

Martin O'Malley. Credit: Social Security Administration