Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is asking Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner Frank Bisignano to provide additional information about the wait times for phone calls, amid reports of discrepancies in data.
In a letter sent Sunday evening to Bisignano, provided exclusively to The Hill, Warren followed up on her meeting with the SSA chief Wednesday, when, the senator said, she secured a commitment from Bisignano “that SSA would undergo a public audit by the Inspector General regarding your phone call wait time data reporting and that you would publish additional wait time data.”
A June survey from Warren’s staff found that wait times averaged nearly an hour and 45 minutes, with maximum wait times lasting longer than three hours, according to the senator.
“But the SSA is failing to provide policymakers and the public with accurate information about the extent of the problem, using convoluted calculations to obfuscate the real data, or withholding information entirely,” she wrote in her letter.
Warren said she has communicated with the inspector general about the audit and thanked the SSA chief for “agreeing to a rigorous, independent, public audit.”
The senator did not specify when the audit would take place.
She asked Bisignano to provide data by Aug. 11, including on the total number of calls received; details about the calls taken by an artificial intelligence tool — including the percentage of calls dropped, transferred, or ended without resolving the issue; the same details about the calls taken by a human customer service representative.
Warren expressed similar concerns about the circumstances that, she said, led the SSA to send out “an inaccurate and overtly partisan email to the millions of ‘my Social Security’ users that purportedly described the ‘Big Beautiful Bill.’”
“The email contained a number of falsehoods about the benefits of the bill, including an inaccurate statement that it ‘eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security,’” Warren wrote in the letter.
