The Social Security review as mandated by the Government Performance Act of 1993 specifically focuses on five selected areas to assess the agency's performance. These areas are as follows:
             1. Providing timely, accurate, and useful information and services to the public
             2. Making disability determinations more timely and accurate;
             3. Reducing long-term disability benefits because people return to workplace;
             4. Providing timely information to decision makers to address program policy issues such as long-term trust fund solvency; and
             5. Reducing fraud, waste, and error in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program.
             The report focused on (1) progress that the Social Security Administration (SSA) in achieving these outcomes and the strategies implemented; (2) comparison of SSA's fiscal year 2000 to fiscal year 2002 performance plan including major management challenges, which includes high-risk areas of strategic human capital management and information security identified by SSA's inspector general and the SSA.
             The Social Security Administration provides benefits for retirees, survivors, disability claimants as well as supplemental security income for the poor or needy. In administering these programs, the SSA has mixed success in the area of providing timely, accurate, and useful information and services to the public. Specifically the report noted that SSA continued to revise prior indicators and goals. Also, the SSA was cited for its inability to provide timely performance data. Specific incidents cited was the goal of meeting and lowering the number of 800 calls received by the agency. SSA met this objective, but failed to report on the progress of improving 800-number service accuracy due to data not being available. SSA further had the goal of training its customer service staff in ways to improve accuracy on issues that were error-prone. The report noted that SSA, without justification, merge...