CASE STUDY 7: A Funeral in the Public Service Center Hal G. Rainey For many years, the Social Security Administration (SSA) followed a very bureaucratized process for handling claims. A “claim” is a request for services, such as a retiree’s application for SSA to begin paying his or her social security benefits (that is, to start sending monthly checks to him or her). Claims handling also involves many different functions, such as updating records, adding and deleting dependents and relatives from records, handling changes in the requests, and other matters. For years, the claims would be handled like this: a client (a citizen making a claim) would apply at a local Social Security Administration office, or by mail. The local office would forward the claim to one of eight public service centers (PSCs) in eight different regions of the country. At the PSC, a different unit would handle each different phase of handling the claim. One unit would receive the claim and route it to the others. Another unit had specialists, called claims authorizers, who would rule on the legality of the claim—did the person have a legitimate claim? Then a claim would be shipped, with a large batch of other claims, to a next unit that contained benefits authorizers, or specialists who would calculate how much the client should receive in social security payments. Then the claim would move to another unit for disbursement or payment of claims, and to another for filing and retention. This process was like a big assembly line, with the claim moving from one phase of the work to another. Congress added many programs and specifications to social security and related programs. At the same time, the nation’s population grew and became more complex. The claims-handling process got much more complicated, and this assembly-line system began to have problems, such as many delays in handling claims and many lost claims. As an example of the problems with the system, when a benefits authorizer would find that a claims authorizer had not provided all the information about a claim that the benefits authorizer needed, the claim had to be delivered back to the claims authorization unit that had previously handled it. Often, the returned claim went back to a different person from the one who worked on it to begin with. This resulted in slow processing and frequent mistakes. SSA went through a long period of trying to figure out how to resolve the problems, and finally decided to adopt a modular design in the PSCs. They put together in units, called modules, all the different specialists needed to process a claim—claims authorizers, benefits authorizers, typists, file clerks, and others. These groups worked together like teams. They would take a client’s claim and work it through to completion, so that they actually had the person as the client of their module—they could identify the clients as theirs. They could also communicate more readily with each other about any problems tha ...