Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is asking Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Frank Bisignano to provide additional information about the wait times for phone calls, amid reports of discrepancies in data.<\/p>\n
In a letter sent Sunday evening to Bisignano, provided exclusively to The Hill, Warren followed up on her meeting with the SSA chief Wednesday, when, the senator said, she secured a commitment from Bisignano \u201cthat SSA would undergo a public audit by the Inspector General regarding your phone call wait time data reporting and that you would publish additional wait time data.\u201d<\/p>\n
A June survey from Warren\u2019s staff found that wait times averaged nearly an hour and 45 minutes, with maximum wait times lasting longer than three hours, according to the senator.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the SSA is failing to provide policymakers and the public with accurate information about the extent of the problem, using convoluted calculations to obfuscate the real data, or withholding information entirely,\u201d she wrote in her letter.<\/p>\n
Warren said she has communicated with the inspector general about the audit and thanked the SSA chief for \u201cagreeing to a rigorous, independent, public audit.\u201d<\/p>\n
The senator did not specify when the audit would take place.<\/p>\n
She asked Bisignano to provide data by Aug. 11, including on the total number of calls received; details about the calls taken by an artificial intelligence tool \u2014 including the percentage of calls dropped, transferred, or ended without resolving the issue; the same details about the calls taken by a human customer service representative.<\/p>\n
Warren expressed similar concerns about the circumstances that, she said, led the SSA to send out \u201can inaccurate and overtly partisan email to the millions of \u2018my Social Security\u2019 users that purportedly described the \u2018Big Beautiful Bill.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe email contained a number of falsehoods about the benefits of the bill, including an inaccurate statement that it \u2018eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security,\u2019\u201d Warren wrote in the letter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is asking Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Frank Bisignano to provide additional information about the wait times for phone calls, amid reports of discrepancies in data.<\/p>\n