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The SSA sucks

I went to the local branch office of the Social Security Administration yesterday to apply for a replacement social security card. I have almost no idea what happened to the last one… but I have a sneaking suspicion that a certain little girl was involved.

This place is the poster-child for inefficient government bureaucracy. It made the DMV look good. It was so bad, it was a cliche of itself. A real-life specimen of a mockery of a social security office. The kind you’d find in a movie like Men In Black if that movie featured a social security office.

All I had to do was show my ID and give the nice lady, with the expression of utter, but long ago accepted, defeat, the application I’d filled out the night before. Still, it took an entire soul-sucking hour to get out of there with a receipt and a promise of a new card in two weeks.

Don’t lose your social security card. It’s not worth it.

Comments

  1. Jonathan Kamens on 2005-08-07 19:54:33 wrote: The software that the Social Security Administration (SSA) uses to canonicalize mailing addresses when sending out social security cards has a bug which causes correct ZIP codes in some addresses to be replaced with incorrect ZIP codes. This bug has been present for at least five years and has caused the social security cards for three of my children to be “lost” in the mail after their births. The first two times this happened to me, the SSA resent a duplicate card when I contacted them and complained that the original had never arrived. The first two times this happened to me, the SSA refused to investigate why the original card never arrived. The third time this happened to me, I finally convinced the SSA to investigate, and the bug was exposed. The SSA refuses to admit that the behavior of their software is a bug, despite the fact that any competent software engineer familiar with address-canonicalization technology would understand immediately that it is after being given a test case illustrating it. The SSA refuses to issue a duplicate card for my youngest child unless I file a form SS-5, which requires that I either (a) send original, personal identification documents through the mail, which I am unwilling to do because of concerns about identity theft and document loss, or (b) submit the form SS-5 in person at one of their offices, which I am unwilling to do because I think it’s entirely unreasonable for me to have to miss work to correct the SSA’s error. The SSA has already admitted that my youngest child’s card was lost in the mail and that they know why this happened. They’ve been corresponding with me at the address to which the card was supposed to have been sent, which is in their records, which means that they know for a fact that I am the father of the child whose card was lost and that I am legally allowed to receive a copy of the card. That they nevertheless refuse to issue a duplicate card has no legitimate justification and can be explained only as bureaucratic inertia or a stubborn refusal to admit fault. See http://www.mit.edu/~jik/ssa-zip.html for additional details.

  2. Brant on 2006-05-22 16:36:12 wrote: It took me 4 hours to get a new one in Arizona! Everyone but me was trying to acquire citizenship into the country. :-/

  3. jim long on 2008-05-24 10:08:43 wrote: well ssa sent me an overpayment in 06 or as they say incresment in pay. in then in 08 they won’t it back in full how dumb is that just damm crazy as hell!