The Social Security Administration receives about 30 million letters and packages from the Postal Service each year with forms and evidence from citizens applying for services.
Each parcel takes about four minutes to open, scan and process. If you do the math, SSA employees are taking 120 million minutes or 2 million person-hours opening up mail.
SSA is about to take a big bite out of that time and effort by implementing e-signatures capabilities for more than 30 forms and removing the signature requirement altogether for 13 forms. And for SSA, this is just the beginning.
“It’s clear we needed to move on from that world,” said Betsy Beaumon, Social Security’s chief transformation officer, in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network. “Our customers have been telling us we want to be able to do things electronically. We need better ways to communicate with the Social Security Administration. This is one of a number of areas where we’re really focusing on, how do we better communicate with our customers.”
SSA says 90% of the most commonly used forms by its customers now will offer the new e-signature capability.
