Social Security Expects to Cut Services Sharply

Top officials of the Social Security Administration are privately predicting that sharply rising caseloads and expected budgetary restrictions will force them to cut services significantly this year.

Officials say their top priority will be getting the monthly Social Security checks out on time to the 42 million people who already receive benefits of one kind or another.

But everything else will take longer, from delays in changing a recipient’s address to adjusting the check of a retired person who works part time or handling the application of a blind person who lost his job in the recession and qualifies for a special welfare program.

Internal agency documents predict that processing time for disability claims will rise from three months to six months. Backlogs for retirement claims and for a special welfare program covering poor aged or blind people already have increased.

The warnings about cutbacks in services are contained in internal documents that the agency has prepared to help it argue its case before the Office of Management and Budget, which is pressing officials there to hold spending down.

The agency said it expects to encounter serious problems even if it receives the full 9% increase recommended in the fiscal 1992 budget that was submitted by President Bush on Feb. 4.

But it may receive a far smaller increase because the Social Security Administration will be in direct competition with all other domestic programs under the spending restrictions contained in last year’s budget agreement between the White House and Congress.

White House officials contend that the Social Security Administration has more than enough money to do its job. Over the last 2 1/2 years, there has been a hefty increase in its administrative budget, which has climbed to $4.5 billion for the new fiscal year from $3.7 billion in 1989.

“Their appetite is insatiable,” an official complained.

The documents forecast sharply increasing caseloads:

--Pending claims for retirement and survivors’ benefits rose to 81,470 at the end of December, up from 70,588 a year earlier.

--Pending disability claims jumped to 253,240, an 18% rise.

--Supplemental security income, a special program for poor aged, blind or disabled people, had 306,000 claims pending in field offices, a rise of 34%. It now takes 18 days to process an SSI case, up from 14 days a year ago.

“Claims-processing times for disability cases will increase from three to six months,” said an agency budget report obtained by The Times. The number of disability cases awaiting action could soar to 553,000 by the start of fiscal 1992 on Oct. 1.

The recession also is contributing to the backlog. The “number of disability claims filed increases as we enter a period of economic slowdown,” the report said.

“As jobs disappear from the national economy, those persons who are disabled and working also lose their jobs and tend to file for disability benefits,” the report noted.

Budget stringency will present “a real challenge to all managers and employees” at the agency, Social Security Commissioner Gwendolyn S. King said in an interview.

“We will keep the priority on benefits--people are entitled to get their checks in a timely way,” she said. “Other things will take longer.”

Some local managers say service has already declined noticeably.

For example, the Fall River, Mass., office no longer sends field workers to senior citizens’ centers and apartment complexes to seek people who may be eligible for retirement or survivors’ benefits but do not understand the programs.

In the office itself, “we resort to stopgap measures, like having people fill out the forms themselves,” district manager Donald Singewald said.

“For disability cases, we give them a package with a long and complicated medical history form, and we say: ‘Take it home and do the best you can and come back in a we”

Singewald says his office is understaffed and he cannot replace workers who retire because of a regional hiring freeze. King insists that there is no hiring freeze.

The 9% budget increase proposed by the Bush Administration would enable Social Security to hire an additional 760 workers to help with the growing backlogs.

However, even if Social Security gets the full increase, the number of new disability cases would rise faster than the agency’s ability to handle them, the Social Security Administration asserts in its budget document.

Existing disability cases are supposed to be reviewed every three years, to see if the beneficiary has recovered sufficiently to return to work. Instead, thousands of old cases will be ignored because agency personnel will be occupied with the new applications.

Another major problem is the toll-free number used by beneficiaries to get information and to arrange appointments at local Social Security offices. Callers are frequently discouraged when they get a busy signal.

The busy-signal rate this year is forecast at 25% of phone calls on normal days and 50% on peak days, such as the first two or three days of the month after checks have been delivered.

However, those figures may be unduly optimistic. In October, the first month of the current fiscal year, the phone was busy for 47% of callers during the month and for 60% on peak days.

On Feb. 4, the agency answered just 280,000 of 1.5 million calls.