Frank Bisignano on Preserving Social Security: We’re ‘Fixing the Foundation,’ It’s Like Going into a Broken Company

RUSH EXCERPT:
BISIGNANO: "Yeah. So the stat stats that are produced right now — stats that are produced right now say in ’33 it will pay out at 83%. And what we’re doing right now is fixing the foundation just like I’d do if we were going into a company that was broken. We get the operations to work right. We’re a money movement organization. We have a lot of opportunity to improve the accuracy of payments. People talk about a 1% error rate, and I frequently say it needs to be five decimal points to the right of that. When that all happens, None of that’s in the calculus. And it will come into it over the next couple of years. Along with that we were handed in my second week a report from the inspector general that talked about $18 billion of unacted, erroneous payments. We’ve already solved $9 billion of that. So I believe fixing the foundation, building a digital first organization, people like to talk about 72 million Americans as beneficiaries. I like to talk about more than 300 million Americans being served in our field offices, on the phone and 11— 1.5 million times a day on the web. We will have a bold goal of 200 million digital users. All of this will eliminate a lot of fraud, and abuse, and there’s nothing in that calculation for that getting smaller right now. Let’s get the foundation fixed. That’ll happen this year. Let’s turn it into the best digital performing agency there is, deliver services at the levels we’re delivering now and better and then we’ll figure out what the economic hole possibly is."