A Government Agency That Works

By: Brian Anderson
Date: 9/1/2005

What do you think of when asked questions about the Social Security Administration (SSA)? A monolith office building in Washington, DC, where information goes in (money and forms) and your parents receive their retirement checks? Today's SSA is an advanced organization that is saving us, the taxpayers, by adopting new technologies and programs that have moved it to the "bleeding" edge.

Twenty years ago, government agencies only accepted data on nine-track tapes; and eight-track tapes are what we played in our cars. Companies were forced to outsource reporting to large data centers or service bureaus where these tapes could be generated. The tape drives were used as backup devices; random-read only devices and props in Hollywood military and spy movies. I just tried to use my nine-track drive, after a three-year vacation, and it wouldn't work. I called the maintenance company and they wanted $400 for an office visit, and that was just to have them diagnose the drive. I'm thinking about leaving a driveby donation on their rear dock.

Let's move forward to a brief 15 years ago and the move towards 5 1/4-inch floppy diskettes and 3 ½-inch diskettes. Instead, let's just forget about the 5 1/4-inch floppies...their memories are just too painful. The advent of the "floppy" allowed organizations to bring the year-end reporting in-house, and the desktop revolution was underway. With the broad acceptance of the PC, and accounting software manufacturers producing their software for desktop and local LANS, states joined the bandwagon for electronic reporting of unemployment tax reporting; and the quarterly State Unemployment Tax (SUTA). The "paperless" revolution was underway.

What if you had 50,000 employees and wanted to do your own electronic reporting? SSA and the IRS (if you had that many 1099s) would not accept paper, not anymore. Do you remember sitting at your machine swapping 30 diskettes? What if one of them was bad? Now that I look back on it, it all seems like a very bad dream. You only had three chances to submit a good file; otherwise you faced huge (large, gargantuan and other descriptive words) penalties, frequently more than your annual salary. Even with this leap in technology, it frequently took two years to receive the mismatched or invalid Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) reports.

Have you ever received the notification letter with a paper listing of the bad TINs and a $50 penalty for each one? What I liked most about these letters was that you could receive a complete listing in electronic format on tape. Not nine-track tape, not floppy disk, but some obscure format sold only by "Martian" computer companies. No help at all, but wait, I thought we were in the paperless age? With the vagaries of the economy and the fluctuating demand for workers, it can be difficult to procure background checks in a timely manner and fulfill client staffing demands. When your phone rings and a client has a big order to fill, do you sometimes shortcut your procedures? Do you, or your staff, think you'll catch up later, when things slow down? I will admit that I sometimes put myself in that position, but honestly, I'm rooting for the never slowing-down problem.

In just the last year, SSA has implemented a reporting process where companies are informed right away with the number of mismatched TINs. Unfortunately, they are still sending paper forms of the offending information. I didn't mention that all of this cutting-edge technology is available for submitters who utilize the Internet and the Business Services Online (BSO) portal. The BSO portal may, in fact, be the "Holy Grail" of Internet applications. While you may have to sift through hundreds of attacks via emails, spam and phishing (sending email to a user falsely claiming to be a legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information to be used for identity theft), the BSO portal allows you to actually accomplish some work. Multiply your Internet issues by each member of your staff that you grant access to the Internet and you can begin to agree with the amount of dollars that are wasted by all of this business and personal connectivity and non-business surfing. The Internet's prolific success may lend itself to an early demise. Wait, is that editorializing?

The technological advancements made by SSA, and the IRS, are positive applications of our tax dollars. If only we could apply a broad-brush to other government agencies with such a positive impact. But, we don't yet live in a perfect world. When the rules of employee verification are such that you are to verify the social security number of an applicant and then the employee information provided is proved false, you can't then let the person go because of privacy violations - does this make any sense? There was a movie made in 1970 about these conundrums titled Catch-22. Was the movie a comedy or a prescient forecast of government in the 21st century?

Brian Anderson is the President of Professional Automation Services, Inc. He can be contacted at 866.864.4647, or by email at brian@proautomation.com, or visit www.proautomation.com.