SSA-L3365, Request for Employee Information
SSA-L4002, Request for Employer Information
20 CFR 422.120
Revisions to the Collection Instrument
We are revising the PRA statement to reflect our current boilerplate language. The current language, which dates back to the last reprint of the form, is now outdated.
SSA's Office of the General Counsel is conducting a systematic review of SSA's Privacy Act Statements on agency forms. As a result, SSA is updating the Privacy Act Statement on this form.
DECOR One-Time Study
In addition to the regularly scheduled DECOR Notices, SSA plans to conduct a one-time study to test potential changes to the Notices that will allow expanded automation of the DECOR process, and to improve the quality and quantity of earnings reports processing.
Background
Each year millions of wage and Self Employment reports fail SSA’s identity matching processes and our system places them into a special file known as the Earnings Suspense File (ESF). SSA has a variety of methods and procedures that we use to resolve the discrepancies in these reports. DECOR is one process whereby we ask the earners or employers to verify certain information to resolved errors in the reports. We send as many as eleven million letters each year with marginal effectiveness.
SSA’s Office of Quality Performance, Division of Automated Solutions (OQP DAS) developed several processes to provide resolution to some of the reports that remain unresolved in the ESF. We continue to review the files and analyze information in an effort to provide additional automation to improve the quality and quantity of earnings reports processing. To test these efforts, we designed a notice and two sets of questions to assess potential changes to the DECOR process.
The DECOR process will lend itself to an automated process through the addition of verifiable personal data not contained in Form W-2. For instance, we expect that by obtaining the date of birth we will be able to run a search of other SSA records matching the name and date of birth provided in the DECOR response. Similarly, we hope to resolve more reports in the ESF through these additional data elements.
Timeframe for DECOR Study
SSA will mail questionnaires to employers and individuals over a period of six months. We will send an equal number of letters to each group to determine compliance rates for each. The letters will request one or two pieces of new information that would lend itself to automated searches of SSA record systems. OQP will take six months to collect the information and run the searches against SSA records. OQP will complete the study after SSA completes the routine DECOR process. This allows a comparative for resolution of the reports.
Description of the Cover Letter
We intend the cover letter primarily as an introduction of the regional OQP representative handling the specific case. In addition, we included a minimal explanation of the study. The first page includes the following information:
Introduce the employee and provide contact information
Limited explanation of the source of our information and purpose of the study
A brief explanation of the use of information
The second page of the cover letter contains the Privacy Act Statement. We specifically designed this statement for use with this study. It informs the respondent about the study and explains our authority for collecting the information:
Provide specific authority for obtain information
Explain the current program upon which this follow up is based
Inform as to the potential to share information, particularly with other government entities
Introduce the computer matching for which the information is intended
OQP Study Questionnaire
We created two questionnaires for use in the study. The first questionnaire is for the employer and we will use it to gather wage information. We intend to send half of the letters to employers. The second questionnaire is for the individuals, and contains language general enough to use for wage and self-employment cases. The questionnaires will include the following information:
Lead data on the questionnaires will propagate from the DECOR table (name, SSN, money amount, and EIN{wage cases})
There are questions designed to correct errors of name or SSN
We will collect new information that is not on the current DECOR letters
Automation will come from the information the respondents did not previously submit
We will not solicit recontact information (phone number)
Burden Information
As shown in the IC for this study, we will mail approximately 5,000 letters during this study. We expect a 60% return rate from the respondents (approximately 3,000 responses), with an estimated response time of five minutes to fill out each returned questionnaire. Therefore, we estimate a burden of 250 hours for this study.
We do not intend this to be a statistically valid study, which is why we chose such a small respondent sample. Therefore, we will not use statistical methods for this collection. The purpose of this study set will be to substantiate the concept of automated searching and reliance of the supplemental information added from the new questions.
| File Type | application/msword |
| File Title | Addendum to the Supporting Statement for Form SSA-2528 |
| Author | Naomi Lebowitz |
| Last Modified By | 889123 |
| File Modified | 2010-09-02 |
| File Created | 2010-09-02 |