Dismissed SSA advisory panel had a lasting effect, chairman says

A defunct advisory panel tasked with guiding the Social Security Administration on bringing its technology architecture up to date contributed to improvements at the agency even though SSA failed to implement most of its recommendations, the panel’s chairman said Wednesday.

Commissioner Michael Astrue terminated SSA’s Future Systems Technology Advisory Panel in January, stating the agency did not have sufficient resources to support the panel or implement its recommendations.

At the time it was canceled, SSA said it had fully implemented 11 of the 78 recommendations the panel made during its four-year lifespan and was working on 40 others, according to an Aug. 20 report from the agency’s inspector general. More recently, SSA announced it would not complete work on the remaining 40 recommendations it had committed to, the auditors said.

It’s not possible to say whether the agency genuinely complied with the 11 completed recommendations or how much progress it made on the 40 partially completed recommendations because SSA officials didn’t document or explain their actions, the auditor said.

The panel’s chairman, Alan Balutis, told Nextgov on Wednesday that the auditor’s report missed the big picture.

“For us, the issue was less about counting recommendations than it was about carrying out the real charter we felt we had from the commissioner and from the agency,” Balutis said. “That was to provide an early warning on issues that would be challenging to the agency, to bring in best practices from the private sector and other federal agencies, and to push staff at SSA to raise their game to cope with some of the challenges the organization faces.”

By that measure, Balutis said, he thinks his panel’s work led to significant improvements at SSA.

“I really do see a greater emphasis and interest in moving more practices online and taking a greater advantage of [information technology] as opposed to brute-force-throw-people-at-a-problem kinds of solutions,” he said.

The panel’s recommendations ranged from technical fixes, such as emailing image files rather than faxing documents, to big picture recommendations, such as not forecasting IT spending more than five years out.

Balutis regrets that the advisory panel’s work was canceled, he said, but is hopeful a similar panel will be launched under the next commissioner.

The 1994 Social Security Reform Act made SSA an independent agency and established a six-year term for its commissioner, ensuring continuity of leadership during presidential transitions. Astrue is a Bush-era holdover whose term will end in 2013, regardless of whether President Obama or Republican nominee Mitt Romney wins the presidency.

SSA did not respond to a Nextgov request for comment on the auditor’s report.