The Online Newsletter of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations, Inc.

President's Message

By Ron Buffaloe

NCSSMA President

As I travel about the country speaking at the regional association annual meetings I explain how we determine what our five or six key issues are each year, give a status report on each item, and talk about how our standing committees, national Executive Committee, and officers have to keep those issues at the forefront, as they guide the association's activities for the year.

These five or six (or more) key issues are often long range goals—issues that we know may take more than one year to accomplish, such as securing adequate staffing resources for the field or improving the equity of the field management grade structure. They arise from our yearly resolutions process, starting with proposals from individual members that work their way through a regional association, are submitted at the annual meeting, are debated and adopted, and set the agenda for the National Council for the next year.

While we all know these key items are important and need to be worked on nationally, I was recently asked to talk to the members of a regional association about some of the other reasons it is important to have a national management association. I would like to share with you why I think a national management association is vital to every field manager.

One, certainly, is to give attention to the many other issues important to field management that are time sensitive, that can't wait years for a resolution. The last six months seem to have provided more than the usual number of “opportunities” to bring issues forward to the leaders of SSA, to respond to issues the agency is initiating, and to have an impact on decisions directly affecting field managers. Looking back, I am amazed at the variety of activities and issues with which we have dealt since last October.

These include letters we have initiated on subjects like the agency's suggestions system, fugitive felon recontacts, space issues, and SSN verification for third parties, just to name a few, and major position papers we have written on a two year probationary period for new hires, training in field offices, and the problems of single manager offices.

Another important role we play is being able to name members to serve on national workgroups set up by the major components of the agency. In the last six months we've been asked to be a part of seven national workgroups and committees, including the Medical CDR Intercomponent Team, the Leadership Strategy Workgroup, the Time Allocation System workgroup, the eTravel Workgroup, the Operations IT Strategic Vision for Programmatic Systems Workgroup, the 2006 Deputy Commissioner for Operations (DCO) Operating Plan Workgroup, and the National TSC Steering Committee. On these workgroups we are able to propose ideas and to argue against other ideas, with the goal being to have the final workgroup recommendations improve the situation for field managers.

These opportunities to be involved in or to have an impact on decisions being made that impact field management just would not be possible if you did not have a viable, active national management association. The elected officers, Executive Committee, thirteen standing committees, and numerous workgroup volunteers all work together, hand in hand with the ten regional management associations, to be the “unfiltered voice of management” in SSA.

I could pick many examples over the past six months but would like to give just one example of how the input of your national management association has positively impacted field managers. On February 24, 2005, a member alerted us to significant changes in the reporting requirements for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in field offices. We would have to start keeping stroke tallies of an expanded list of items that met the definition of an FOIA request, retroactive back to 10/01/04, and post the information monthly to a website. On February 25, after talking to the Office of General Counsel, Office of Public Disclosure, we protested to DCO that the reporting would be administratively burdensome, time consuming, and certainly inaccurate for the first two quarters of FY2005.

That same day DCO advised that they would check out the new reporting requirements. On March 2 DCO responded, thanked us for bringing the issue to their attention, explained that they had not been involved in and were not previously aware of the policy change, gave us information on how the new reporting requirements had been developed by the various Central Office components that had been involved, and advised that the policy had been rescinded, pending resolution of some other issues. We were informed that the regions would be told of this change, a draft proposal would be written with new instructions for field offices, the draft proposal would be shared with us, and that our suggestions on the new draft would be appreciated.

On April 7 the draft proposal was shared with the National Council along with a request for comments. The new proposal was to remove the FOIA reporting requirements from the field and to replace them with a centralized data collection process. The proposal was reviewed in detail by the National Council Management Committee and on April 13 we wrote to DCO expressing our appreciation for the effort to change the FOIA reporting requirements and giving our support for the new proposal.

While not every issue turns out this well for our association, we have had great success in bringing many of the concerns of our members to the attention of the agency, and through submitting emails, letters, papers, and serving on workgroups get to a resolution with which everyone can live. This, along with developing a rapport and feeling of mutual trust with the agency's leaders, is something that can only be done through your management association.  

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Check Day in Lesotho

By Pete Neumann, DM, (retired)

Former President of the NESSMA/

Current Peace Corps Volunteer

Editor's Note: The husband and wife team, Pete Neumann and Maria Steele, are retired District Mangers from the Boston Region. In their retirement, Pete and Maria joined the Peace Corps and are currently working in Lesotho, South Africa. Pete recently shared with us what social security check day is like in Lesotho.

Even though I am nearly 3 years retired from the Social Security Administration, the brain cells still retain a little. Our system pays benefits based on work – with the amount determined by how much we earn and for how long we worked. The Social Security Administration also administers a federal needs based welfare program called Supplemental Security Income, or SSI. These benefits are based on need and either age or disability. A work history is not needed. The Lesotho system is closer to the SSI program.

In Lesotho, you can receive a benefit of 150 maloti per month if you are 75 years or older. It does not matter if you worked some, a lot, or not at all. Whether you have other income or resources is also not a factor. The reality is that there is no other income and resources. If you are 75, you get the 150 Maloti. A maloti is Lesotho currency. A Loti (maloti is more than one) is exactly equivalent to the South African Rand. 150 maloti equals about $25.

Here's how you collect it. Remember, you are 75 years old……..

Each month you present yourself to a designated post office bringing your identity papers – these papers have your photo and establish your age. At the post office, you stand in lines – or what looks mostly like a crowd, but is called lines. You will likely be in lines that last for days. You will be with other elders like yourself and armed policeman. They are there not for crowd control, but for security – to keep the post office from being robbed since benefits are paid in cash. At the end of the day, if you have not collected your benefit, you must find a place to sleep. Police stations sometimes offer shelter. Others go to friends who happen to live close by. Otherwise, you would return to your village, no matter where that is. You would walk or take a crowded taxi and then come back to the post office the next day. You get in a line to await your turn and maybe go home again that night to return again.

The lines are not organized in any pattern I recognize. There is no head of the line, middle or end that I can see. They seem more like a mass of people grouped on all sides of the post office. Somehow there is order and people in these “lines” do not crane their necks to see who's next or press in any particular direction for advantage or bicker or gripe. They wait.

The post office in Mohales Hoek looks like it might be part of a set for a cowboy movie. It is a one story building that is dark, creaky with wooden flooring and old and dirty stucco walls. There are a few benches inside placed in front of a waist high counter. On top of the counter are steel barred windows where business is conducted. When you finally get inside, you wait for the clerk to signal you to come forward. You present yourself along with your identity papers. Your name is checked on the registry (how you got on the registry in the first place is another story).  If you are really you and you are due the benefit, you work your hand through the bars so the postal clerk can grab it to ink your thumb. The clerk then presses your thumb to a spot beside your name on the registry. You get your money and head home. You get to do this every month. Rain, snow, hail are not factors. No direct deposit, no conducting business by phone, no internet filing. You go and you hope you do not wait too long. More than that, you hope that your name is on the list.

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Greg Heineman

Dental Plan joins Telephone Service as a NCSSMA Member Benefit

By: Greg Heineman, Chairman, NCSSMA Communications Committee

Over the years, NCSSMA has looked to provide discounted services to benefit our members. For years we have sponsored discount telephone services through Cognigen INC, and many members have enjoyed significant savings on their phone bill as a result of this relationship. Cognigen offers low cost and flat rate long distance plans, with rates as low as 2.7 cents a minute. Broadband, calling card and cellular services are also available. I encourage you to read more about Cognigen's services at http://www.ld.net/?ncssma .

Recently NCSSMA entered into a relationship with AmeriPlan Dental Services to provide discounted dental services to our members and friends. For a fee as low as $11.95 per month for an individual and $19.95 per month for a family, you can take advantage of significant discounts for dental services from AmeriPlan dentists. Some of these discounts can save you up to 80% of the cost of certain procedures. To learn more you can visit AmeriPlan's web site for NCSSMA members at: http://www.MyBenefitsPluscom/12663129 .

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Editor's Corner

By Phil Walton

We Get Letters

We received considerable positive feedback from around the country on the Organizational Dissonance editorial in the last edition. Thank you.

Not surprisingly, those giving feedback did not care to bare their souls publicly. I guess that's why I have been editor of MASS Media and FrontLine for ten years. No one else wants the job.

Here are some excerpts, sanitized to avoid identification:

The staffing decisions that have been made over the past several years within SSA remind me of the old saying about “too many cooks.” With more and more “cook” positions to point out workloads that need attention, we are constantly running from pillar to post and back again.. There is constant, unrelenting pressure and stress caused by individuals whose only reason for getting up in the morning is to point out where you are falling down during the day.

The bottom line is we have considerably more work than we have capacity to move it.

Yet there are positions whose only mission in life seems to be to point out workloads we may not be keeping up with.  We get lists to work so we can remove the "stuck" cases.  We are asked to review lists that are informational in nature.  And don't forget to cover that S08 with an S06.  And if you haven't caught your tail yet, there are still prisoner workloads and RPS/PUPS issues to deal with.

We survive due to the hard work and dedication of the staff, without which we wouldn't move any work at all.  The ultimate irony is if we had the appropriate staff to meet the public service needs, we wouldn't need all those cooks in the first place. .

Staffing 101

No matter the issue under discussion, field office staffing comes up somewhere, somehow in the course of things. And it should. It is the fundamental issue involved in service delivery. SSA has created a vast science of it all--- DOWR, DOWS, SUMS, etc. --- how much staff one field office gets versus another is portrayed as a vast and complex scientific undertaking.

There are no doubt more FTE's devoted to monitoring this vast system than we would care to know about. Hours upon hours can be spent understanding how this system works. But we need to back up to the baseline, rudimentary questions: SSA overall has over 64,000 FTE's budgeted. About 34,500 of these are in field operations. That starting number is the threshold issue, long before the pseudo-science of how to divide it up. Every FTE in field operations is based on work units. What formula, what science is used to determine the starting point, the overall allocation to the field? What formula is used to determine how many FTE's are in headquarters and all the other non-field, support components? How many high impact, public contact and public service organizations have nearly half of their total FTE's not involved in direct service delivery? What is their ratio of overhead positions to service delivery positions? For some years now there has been a focus on the ratio of field office management positions to field office frontline positions. Given the duties most field office management performs, the term overhead is a horrible misnomer. Overhead people do not interview, clear claims and do the mail. What ratio of non-field overhead is desirable? Look at other public and private organizations and see how SSA stacks up with half of their employees “supporting” those on the front lines.

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