Social Security Re-Routing Phone Calls to Juice Their Stats

For years, Social Security has struggled to provide even basic levels of customer service. Lengthy wait times for callers, website crashes, and long lines at field offices have become common, and in recent months, service has gotten worse.

In 2024, the last year of the Biden Administration, the average wait time for callers was 60 minutes. According to the agency’s own performance data, there has been a significant increase in wait times for phone services since President Trump was elected. The last customer service scorecard for the SSA revealed that the average wait time was 86 minutes.

Rather than improve their poor level of customer service, the current Social Security leaders have adopted strategies to paper over the problems.

As we reported in our July newsletter, it appears that Social Security is no longer publicly reporting key performance measures. The agency has stopped reporting their 800 number’s current call wait times, benefit processing times, and many other performance metrics.

Now, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has started to route some calls to other Social Security offices—often to another state and to staffers who don’t have jurisdiction over the caller’s case and who frequently cannot answer callers’ questions or cannot solve their problems.

The effect is that while the agency’s statistics show that call wait times have been reduced, actual customer service has deteriorated even more.

On its own website, the Social Security Administration admitted that “employees shared a specific challenge: sometimes, when answering calls from outside their office’s traditional service area, they were unable to fully assist a very small percentage of customers due to system constraints.”

The SSA maintains that they have taken “decisive and immediate action…[rolling] out an important update to [its] key workload processing systems.” The agency, in a post on its website, maintains that “these updates now allow our employees to meet your needs, regardless of which office you call or where your case is located.”

However, Nash disability attorney Dan Rosen relates that “we have experienced firsthand many times the complications caused by rerouting phone calls. For example, when we call a field office in Chicago, an SSA representative in Wisconsin may answer and can do little but pass along a message to the Chicago office, which often does not get returned. This ‘rigs’ the numbers as it shows on the surface that the SSA is answering calls, but it does little to help the public.”

At Nash Disability Law, we know that the process of applying for Social Security Disability benefits can be frustrating. Whether you’ve been denied disability benefits or you need help applying for benefits in the first place, turn to the experienced Chicago disability lawyers and staff at Nash Disability Law.

Contact us for a FREE evaluation of your specific situation.