Commissioner Astrue: Social Security back up center ready early

House lawmakers say the Social Security Administration is projecting a backlog of 1 million disability claims by the end of fiscal 2010.

But as Social Security isn't standing idly by.

Commissioner Michael Astrue told FederalNewsRadio that an unexpected increase in online applications is being met with a push to get more services and technology online.

I think the good news there is that we have expanded and accelerated the capacity at our backup center. We didn't even have a backup center a few years ago at Social Security. We do have one now. It's up and operational. It should be able to fully back up the system in an emergency in a matter of months.

Work on the back up center started in 2007 in Durham, N.C., with a deadline in mind.

When we run out of frontline capacity in the current National Computing Center in Baltimore in, we're projecting, late 2012, what we'll be able to do is gerry-rig with the back up center until we have capacity from the National Computing Center. And although 2015 is probably the right estimate for the center being fully completed, we expect to have the shell completed and some service provided beginning at some point probably mid-2013, sometime in that time frame. And there will be about a two year transition until that's fully up and operational.

Astrue said an increased workload for Social Security has been anticipated, but nothing like what they're seeing now. "What's happened in the past year," Astrue told the Federal Drive, "is that those (claims) have gone up dramatically above those projections, because it's a response to the recession."

So we have been working very hard to improve and expand the service channels that we have for the public. We can't process this increasing amount of work by the way we did it 20 years ago. We have to be more savvy and the public is really expecting to deal with us online in more and more ways. So we are greatly expanding our suite of online services. We've improved them so that they are much more friendly.

Astrue said he's seeing great progress in the online services since a rather blistering review a few years ago. "We now have the three best in the federal government, and in fact, we improved the very best one this week to provide services to more people, and we're going to be, I believe, the first in the federal government to put those online services into Spanish."

Technology truly is the future of the Social Security, according to the Commissioner.

It's really the only way we can manage the workload. We've gone in a very short period of time from about 10% of our retirement applications filed online to about 36%. That's what's really saved us in the recession. That's given us enough time to deal with all the other people who are flooding into our offices who need help on a wide array of issues.

Astrue credits congressional support, half a billion dollars in funding from the Recovery Act and adjustments in bringing the data center online to maintain service not only without interruption, but even with improvements.

Commissioner Michael Astrue appeared on before a hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this week. FederalNewsRadio's Max Cacas reports progress in clearing the backlogs is now threatened by another, more pressing problem: the furloughs of state disability claims reviewers, whose salary is partially paid for by federal funds.