Social Security Administration

The Social Security Administration (SSA) sends millions of letters each year to notify applicants and recipients about eligibility for or changes in benefits. These letters have excluded essential details needed to understand its decisions, presented information in an illogical order, and required complex analyses to reconstruct benefit payments. Specifically, one or more of the following key points were missing: (1) the reason why SSA sent the letter; (2) the basis for its decision; (3) the financial effect of the decision on the recipient; or (4) the recourse available to the person. For many of the problems, SSA has not taken any corrective action and has repeatedly rescheduled plans to make comprehensive changes. In September 1999, a federal court ordered SSA to develop and implement a plan to improve its Supplemental Security Income letters, prompting SSA to begin a major, multiyear initiative to improve its letters. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Social Security Administration: SSA's Letters to the Public Remain Difficult to Understand, by Barbara D. Bovbjerg, Associate Director for Education, Workforce, and Income Security Issues, before the Subcommittee on Social Security, House Committee on Ways and Means. GAO/T-HEHS-00-205, Sept. 26 (13 pages).

GAO noted that: (1) the majority of letters in each of the four categories GAO reviewed did not clearly communicate at least one of the following key points: (a) SSA's decision (that is, the action SSA was taking on a claim that prompted the agency to send the letter); (b) the basis for SSA's decision; (c) the financial effect of SSA's decision on the person addressed in the letter; or (d) the recourse the person could take in response to SSA's decision; (2) the lack of clarity was caused by one or more problems, such as illogically sequenced information, incomplete or missing explanations, contradictory information, and confusing numerical information; (3) an unclear explanation of the basis for SSA's decision was the most widespread problem among the four categories of letters; (4) for example, it was difficult to understand the basis for SSA's decision in Supplemental Security Income (SSI) award letters because the letters did not explain the relationship between program rules and the amount of the SSI benefit; (5) a subgroup of SSI award letters--those sent to about 13 to 15 percent of SSI awardees who are eligible for previous but not future benefits--were unclear in communicating all four key points; (6) SSA acknowledges that these letters contain the problems GAO identified; however, for many of the problems, the agency has not taken any corrective action; (7) many of the problems GAO identified are not amenable to quick fixes but, rather, will require a comprehensive revision of the language used in the letters and rewriting the agency's software applications that generate them; (8) the agency has repeatedly rescheduled plans to make comprehensive changes for its Social Security benefit adjustment letters because of competing demands for computer systems resources; the agency allocated resources to other priorities, such as making computer system changes that resulted from legislation; (9) however, the agency recently announced plans to make significant changes to this category of letter, but few details are yet available; (10) major improvements to SSI letters were also delayed, but in this case SSA was waiting for resolution of a nationwide court case involving these letters; (11) in September 1999, a federal court ordered SSA to develop and implement a plan to improve its SSI letters, prompting SSA to begin a major, multiyear initiative to improve its SSI letters; (12) this initiative is still in the early phase; and (13) SSA has not placed a high priority on improving its letters to the public.

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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