From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Watchdog Report: Investigating Social Security’s Ticket to Work Program Audio interview by GAO staff with Dan Bertoni, Director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security Related GAO Work: GAO-11-324: Social Security Disability: Ticket to Work Program Participation Has Increased, but Additional Oversight Needed Released on: June 6, 2011 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the Government Accountability Office. It's June 6, 2011. The Social Security Administration’s Ticket to Work Program aims to help eligible beneficiaries find and keep jobs, reducing their dependence on Social Security benefits. A group led by Dan Bertoni, a Director in GAO's Education, Workforce, and Income Security team, recently reviewed the Ticket to Work Program. GAO's Jeremy Cluchey sat down with Dan to learn more. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Can you describe the purpose of the Ticket to Work Program and how it works? [ Dan Bertoni: ] Sure, I'm happy to do that. The basic purpose of the Ticket to Work Program is to help Social Security disability beneficiaries return to work and once they're working, stay at work. The key goal being long-term employment and ultimately reduce dependence on disability benefits. The program is voluntary. It's administered by the Social Security Administration and individuals are enrolled and essentially assigned a ticket, a ticket to work, which is generally worth over $20,000. They can then assign that ticket to one of 1,600 approved employment networks who provide a range of job search and retention services. This may include resume writing assistance, interviewing tips, and even transportation to and from the workforce. In turn those employment networks receive payments from SSA for their efforts to help enrollees find and keep jobs, and that's essentially how the program is designed and works. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Now the program underwent some changes in 2008 that were designed to help boost participation in the program. To what extent were these changes successful? [ Dan Bertoni: ] Since the regulation changes went into effect, ticketholder participation has more than doubled to about 49,000 at present. But that number is still relatively small compared to the 12 million eligible beneficiaries who could in fact partake in this program. Employment network participation also increased marginally to about 1,600 at present. However most of the activity in the bulk of ticket payment dollars are going to only 20 employment networks who received over 70 percent of the $13 million in ticket payments that SSA paid out last year. There were a number of changes in 2008 that have caused the sort of, some of the training in this program I think, but two of the big drivers of trends in the program were lowering their earnings thresholds that trigger payments to employment networks. And another big change was allowing them to actually pay ticketholders. These changes had the effect of making part-time work more attractive for both employment networks and ticketholders. And we believe that the ability to pay ticketholders made shared payment models more attractive. We note in our report that under the shared payment approach, the more active employment networks were simply passing 75 percent of the ticket money back to the ticketholder, taking a 25 percent cut for themselves, and providing no other discernable services whatsoever that we could see. This was in essence a benefit subsidy for the ticketholders. In the absence of any agency data on prevalence, the jury’s out on what's happening to these individuals in terms of their long-term employability. SSA has yet to do that research and we have recommended that they do so sooner rather than later. However during the course of our work we did identify some of the more active ENs engaging in some practices that were of concern. In particular some of these ENs were actively promoting indefinite part-time employment on their Web sites and the idea of keeping ticketholders just below certain income thresholds so as not to jeopardize their ability to continue to receive the federal disability benefits. It was at that point we felt that it was necessary to use our investigative staff to really get behind this issue, understand what levels of services were actually being issued or offered, and the information that these networks were actually providing to ticketholders. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] And what steps did your investigative staff take? [ Dan Bertoni: ] We essentially had an investigator pose as a sibling of a fictitious DI beneficiary and perspective ticket program enrollee. We called various providers to inquire how the program worked, the services that they provided, and ultimately were able to record some of these providers coaching us on the benefits of working part time indefinitely--staying under certain income thresholds--and receiving full disability payments on top of wages. And certainly appears to conflict with the basic goal of the Ticket to Work Program, which is reduce dependence on benefits. Unfortunately these networks were providing the ways as well as the means to undermine this goal and right now SSA doesn't know how extensive this practice is. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What is GAO recommending the Social Security Administration do in order to help improve this program? [ Dan Bertoni: ] First and foremost we recommend that SSA takes steps to monitor trends in employment network service provision and assess long-term program outcomes associated with the various models to ensure at the [background music] end of the day that ticketholders get the appropriate supports but also that taxpayer dollars are protected from waste and abuse. [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO's Web site at GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the next edition of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.