SSA Disability Redesign

In 1994, the Social Security Administration (SSA) set forth an ambitious plan to redesign over a six-year period its process for deciding whether or not a claimant is eligible for disability benefits. Having made little progress by February 1997, SSA issued a scaled-back plan to test and implement major changes. GAO found that SSA is behind schedule on all five of its near-term initiatives and has not clearly demonstrated the efficacy of its proposed changes. SSA limited its ability to keep its plan on track because the redesign team tried to move ahead on many fronts simultaneously. SSA's reengineering efforts require sharper focus, and the agency should concentrate on the initiatives most likely to achieve critical redesign objectives. SSA should adjust its testing approach, and it needs a more complete set of performance goals and measures, including a fully developed quality assurance process.

GAO noted that: (1) even with its scaled-back plan, SSA has been unable to keep its redesign activities on schedule and to demonstrate that its proposed changes will significantly improve the claims process; (2) the inability to keep on schedule was caused, in part, by SSA's overly ambitious plan and its strategy for testing proposed changes; (3) other problems with the design of its tests weakened SSA's ability to predict how the initiatives would operate if implemented; (4) the problems that led to SSA's redesign effort persist, and as SSA continues its efforts to improve the disability claims process the agency has an opportunity to learn from its experience and the best practices of other organizations with reengineering experience; (5) SSA could improve its chances of making future progress by further scaling back its near-term efforts to include only initiatives that are critical to improving the disability claims process; (6) in addition, by testing related process changes together, rather than on a stand-alone basis, and at a smaller number of sites, SSA could free up resources while still obtaining valuable data; (7) SSA should also explore feasible alternatives before committing significant resources toward the testing of specific initiatives; (8) because a process change might function differently under actual operational conditions than it did in a test environment, SSA will need to revise its performance measures to better monitor and more fully assess the impact of changes on the process; and (9) moreover, SSA will need to ensure that an adequate quality assurance process is in place so that any changes SSA makes to the process do not compromise the quality of decisions.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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