Case Solvers

Three Social Security employees harvest ingenuity and software to improve the disability payment process.

In December, the Social Security Administration finished its rollout of eWork, a system for tracking the earnings of Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries. It is based in large part on the efforts of three field office employees who worked on their own time and without a budget. They developed a program called Modernized Return to Work, which helps address a multibillion-dollar problem facing the agency: overpayments to people who receive disability benefits while holding jobs.

The story behind Modernized Return to Work started in Wisconsin. In 1998, managers assessing staff productivity in the Social Security Administration's Madison field office reviewed the tasks employees were expected to perform. One stood out as the most onerous: telling people on disability insurance to repay benefits that should have been stopped, but weren't. Demanding repayment-often large sums-from people with disabilities was not the kind of work most Social Security claims representatives had envisioned when they joined the civil service. "It was the most anti-mission thing they had to do," says Ron Konkol, one-third of the team that built the program.

The managers asked, "Why do these overpayments occur in the first place?" The answer: Employees weren't conducting reviews of beneficiaries' work activity when they were supposed to. The reason: They had neither a standardized process nor a computer program with which to do them.

Reviews occur at the end of a trial period, during which beneficiaries can work without losing their benefits. After that, the agency is supposed to review their earnings to determine whether they exceeded the threshold, after the deduction of such things as travel costs, additional supervision, training and more. The formula is so complex that beneficiaries have no way to do the calculations themselves or anticipate how work will affect their benefits. Without realizing it, many have received payments from the agency long after their benefits should have stopped. "People get these letters saying 'You owe us $35,000,' " says Terri Uttermohlen, technical assistance liaison for the Benefits Assistance Resource Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. "It scares the hell out of them."

Doreen Haug, then a claims representative in Madison, launched an effort to standardize the review process. Konkol was a state liaison at the time, and he met often with advocates for beneficiaries. He gathered their feedback, and made use of his talent for selling ideas. Haug and Konkol spearheaded the development of a set of protocols for collecting earnings information and conducting reviews using basic desktop software. "We considered it to be a done deal," Konkol says. "We didn't see any vision beyond fixing the problem in this office."

But other offices were struggling with the problem, too, and word of what the Madison team had achieved spread. In 1999, Congress passed the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Act, aimed at getting people off disability benefits and back into the workplace. Among other things, the law would make work reviews even more complex by creating new deductions.

If the law was successful, it would increase the volume of the reviews, too. Konkol was asked to serve on an SSA committee convened to meet the law's new demands, and he became chairman of a subcommittee for systems and technology.

The IT department at SSA headquarters in Baltimore was focused on building systems to meet the law's new requirements. But Konkol wanted to launch a PC-based program for the work reviews. He got the green light, but no budget, for the unofficial project. "It was at that point that we hit the ground running," Konkol says. He began searching for a programmer who would volunteer to transform the cobbled-together Madison program into an automated system for other field offices. He had heard of a programmer in SSA's St. Paul, Minn., field office named Dave Broomell. "He had done some inventive things," Konkol says. "It took me about a month and a half to screw up my courage to ask him." Broomell said yes.

The team clicked. "All of us came from field offices, so we could really relate to this process," Broomell says. Still serving in their regular full-time positions, they worked on the project on weekends, sometimes late into the night, and communicated by phone and e-mail, especially after Haug moved to Seattle, where she now serves as a disability policy analyst. They built their system to work with another PC program created in 1990 to help determine whether benefits should continue. It was designed by a colleague from Dallas, Bruce Lacomette. The final product, Modernized Return to Work, automates forms and notices, prioritizes cases for reviews, uses built-in process controls and calculates earnings.

After Konkol gave briefings on Capitol Hill in the fall of 2002, one of the program's innovations-a receipt that was given to beneficiaries as proof that they had reported their earnings-was written into federal law. Then the Social Security brass decided to incorporate Modernized Return to Work's innovations into eWork. "You could have told me something like this would happen, and I never would have believed you," Konkol says.

Last fall, Haug, Broomell and Konkol received the "Suggester of the Year" award at Social Security's headquarters. It was Konkol's second, but he's not finished yet. Now in the works is "Son of MRTW," which Konkol says will help people get back on disability insurance as soon as they stop working. "We've got some solutions," he says, "and the will to see them through."

Growing Pains

Social Security Disability Insurance, which provides financial assistance to citizens unable to work because of long-term physical or mental disabilities, has been growing fast. From 1982 to 2002, the number of beneficiaries doubled while payments quadrupled, according to the Government Accountability Office. In fiscal 2003, the program provided $70 billion to 7.5 million beneficiaries and family members.

Since disability insurance was created in 1965, social and economic changes have improved employment opportunities for disabled people. Congress has passed legislation enacting a series of complex incentives to encourage the program's beneficiaries to return to work. Still, each year less than 1 percent leave the rolls because they rejoined the workforce.

The prospect of receiving an overpayment is one deterrent, say advocates for people with disabilities. An audit by the Social Security inspector general in July estimated that 171,620 people who receive disability benefits had been overpaid $3.15 billion because of work income. The largest overpayments have topped $100,000.