Technical issue at the Social Security Administration has recently caused telephone calls to various field offices to other offices that did not have jurisdiction over the claims, thus making it difficult for service.
On Tuesday, NPR reported That the agency’s field offices had difficulty linking callers to the appropriate staff who could meet their requests. “When it comes to some other office, the jurisdiction is someone else,” Angela Digeronimo, a specialist on SS -claims in Woodbridge, NJ, said to the news service. “You can’t act about it, because your office doesn’t have the ability to empty that claim. You need to report it to the service office, which is the member of the public that they do. So, it’s a bit difficult.”
SSA seems to be initially rejected the allegations. “All SSA field offices are equipped to handle surveys and solve problems for callers, regardless of where a caller lives or where their case originated,” a statement shared with NPR reads.
However, on Friday, it seems that the agency was looking back. In Statement Released to its website on Thursday, SSA acknowledged that it had discovered a service issue that resembled the One NPR previously reported. The statement reads:
“While another visit on August 1 to our New -Brunswick, New Jerseyerze field office, employees shared a specific challenge: sometimes, responding calls from outside the traditional service area of their office, they could not fully help a very small percentage of customers due to systematic restrictions.
The SSA later “came up with a major upgrade to our key work -ready systems,” the agency says. The updates “now allow our employees to meet your needs, regardless of which office you call or where your case is.” Following the agency’s acceptance, NPR later updated his story, noting that SSA sent it another statement that reads: “This critical update took place immediately after the Commissioner for Feedback Bisignano received by SSA employees while visiting field offices.”
Since the beginning of the year, when the Doge Organization of Elon Musk Started a monkey With various federal agencies, worries spread That Trump’s drowning ball crew would try to destabilize social security benefits for millions of Americans. Activists warned This proposed changes to the agency could stimulate service interruptions that would have catastrophic effects on beneficiaries. Obviously, service issues like that reported this week do not inspire much confidence in the agency. If the Trump administration tries to make SSA more “effective” (like Doge’s alleged mandate), it doesn’t seem to be successful. A A recent report De Axios shows that the agency may have lost about 20 percent of its staff since March.
