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     The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has posted an interview it did with Andrew Saul. Here are some excerpts with emphasis added: ... On one of my first field trips, I happened to notice on the door that we closed at 12 o'clock on Wednesdays. I frankly couldn't believe it , because we were losing basically 10 percent of our available time to service our customers by being closed on Wednesday afternoons. ... The 800 number, that has been a major problem, major concern for all our customers. If you called in, you would find you had an unacceptable waiting time � sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes 40 minutes. So, what we've done is we've immediately hired about 1,100 new operators . Our call time right now is down by about 50 percent. We've got farther to go, but I think if you watch over the next six months, we will get the call centers down to the proper waiting time, which will be close to zero. That's a prediction that I'm willi...

     A few years ago, Social Security established an attorney call center, 877-626-6363 , that attorneys could call about problems getting their clients who are under 55 paid. An agency website still lists the number but it's not working. Either you get a fast busy signal or it just rings and rings. It's not like it's hard to get through. It's essentially impossible. Try calling it yourself.      My advice to Social Security is to just take the number off your website and admit that you don't have the personnel to answer your phones. They won't take that advice, though, because it's not politically correct to admit this in a Republican Administration. Exhortations to staff to work harder and smarter are the Republican answer to all staff shortages while taking every action possible to antagonize the staff needed to actually do the work.

     I'm hearing that Social Security Commissioner Saul is considering opening his agency's field offices to the public on Saturdays. Nothing is definite yet. This comes on the heels of a recent decision to keep the field offices open Wednesday afternoons.      I represent claimants before the Social Security Administration. I am extremely concerned about the level of service the agency delivers. If I thought this would help, I'd applaud it. However, I know it's going to have the opposite effect. Field office staff was already stretched almost to the breaking point before the decision to keep the offices open Wednesday afternoons. There is now no time for field office staff to deal with complicated time-consuming tasks because they're on a treadmill dealing with customers who want to be seen. You make the problem worse if you open the field offices on Saturdays. Opening the offices on Saturdays would be great for service if the agency had plenty o...

     From a "Sources Sought" notice posted by the Social Security Administration: The Social Security Administration (SSA) is conducting market research/sources sought to help determine the availability and technical capability of qualified businesses providing an artificial intelligence interface that can provide customer service in a conversational manner. This is not a request for quotations or proposals, and we do not guarantee the issuance of a solicitation as a result of this notice.   We will use the information we obtained from this research for planning purposes only. ... SSA needs to incorporate technology to supplement our first level customer support interactions with automated and intelligent self-serve options our customers expect. We want to go beyond a static FAQs knowledge base, and interact with customers in a conversational manner using Artificial Intelligence (AI). This technology should be capable of undergoing both supervised and unsup...

     Social Security has issued a press release boasting about Commissioner Saul improving service by keeping the agency's field offices open all day on Wednesdays.      I think this decision by Saul qualifies as one of, if not the, most bone-headed actions I can ever remember a Commissioner taking. This isn't going to improve service. It's going to hurt service. I'm pretty sure Saul did this not merely because he lacks understanding about how Social Security's field offices work but because he was unwilling to listen to those who do. I'm pretty sure all of those who do know advised against this. It also comes from an unshakeable belief that federal employees are lazy and that if you just crack the whip, you'll get better work out of them. That's naive. Inevitably in a large organization there are a few bad eggs but Social Security's service delivery problems come almost 100% from not having enough employees.      If you're li...