Death of a Web Site

In 1997, SSA began allowing U.S. citizens to access their Personal Earnings and Benefit Estimate Statement (PEBES) on the agency's Web site. The PEBES report includes workers' lifetime earnings, and SSA's estimate of likely benefits upon retirement.

All workers needed to do was enter five unique identifiers on the SSA Web page: their name, Social Security number, date of birth, place of birth and mother's maiden name. That's substantially more information than most Americans have to provide their bank to access their checking account. But a firestorm resulted nonetheless. USA Today ran a front-page article, "Your Social Security Records Are Online." The Washington Post, New York Times and "Good Morning America" quickly followed up. Three days after the USA Today story, and just over a month after SSA had launched the program, then-acting Social Security Commissioner John J. Callahan decided to take down the Web site.

Ironically, the PEBES report was a creation of the 1974 Privacy Act, which gave citizens the right to access their own public records. As part of the act, Congress ordered SSA to give every American access to information about lifetime earnings and expected Social Security benefits.

Before 1989, workers could request the report only by filing an application form by mail. The application asked for name, date of birth and Social Security number. The SSA made no attempt to verify that information. Since 1989, workers have been able to request applications by phone as well. They would then receive the forms by mail to fill out and mail back to SSA in order to receive their PEBES reports. In 1995, SSA began mailing all Americans over age 60 copies of their PEBES, whether they had requested them or not. SSA now mails reports to every American over 25.

By the mid-1990s, SSA-like most of the federal government-was wrapped up in Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government initiative, and trying to manage for results, a mandate handed down by Congress with the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act. Putting PEBES records online seemed like a perfect way to save money and provide faster, more efficient service. As John Erwin, a member of the SSA's Internet projects team, told Kennedy School professor Deborah Hurley: "We know what is coming: the baby boomer population . . . [by 2010] we're going to be looking at workloads that are 22 percent to 28 percent higher than they are right now. We are not expecting our staffing to change. How do you do 28 percent more work with the same staff? You have to find a way to offload that work, and get the public to help themselves." Offering Internet self-service seemed like the perfect option.

But the SSA made a critical error, Hurley says. "One of the things SSA miscalculated were the audiences they needed to talk to. They should have checked their plan with the privacy advocates. They didn't, so when the press reports hit, they weren't in position to say that they'd already cleared it with them." Indeed, Americans were none too pleased about the prospect that someone could access their earnings history just by knowing a few simple identifiers.

Thousands of phone calls came into the agency. Congress considered legislation, which never was passed, that would direct the agency never again to do business on the Internet. And months of work spent getting the PEBES Web site rolling were gone in an instant.