Evaluation of the Ticket to Work Program Initial Evaluation Report

Ticket-eligible beneficiaries were mailed Tickets. No Tickets were mailed in December 2002.
Ticket mailings resumed again in January, with an additional 10 percent of Ticket-eligible
beneficiaries being mailed their Tickets each month from January through September 2003.
SSA made the rollout schedule for Phase 2 more gradual than that of Phase 1 because of
problems encountered due to the high volume of Tickets being mailed during two of the
Phase 1 implementation months. During the months of May and June 2002, when Ticket
mailings represented 30 and 40 percent of eligible beneficiaries in the Phase 1 states, the
Program Manager staff experienced a volume of calls from beneficiaries induced by the
mailings that substantially exceeded its telephone capacity. Many ENs also experienced high
call volumes to which they were incapable of responding. The more gradual mailing
schedule used in Phase 2 appears to have solved these problems. SSA is scheduling Ticket
mailings in Phase 3 using the same, more gradual schedule used in Phase 2.
B. IMPLEMENTATION FROM A SYSTEM PERSPECTIVE
1. Social Security Administration
a. Implementation Challenges
After the Ticket Act was signed into law in December 1999, SSA immediately began
preparation for implementing the program. Staff of the Office of Employment Support
Programs (OESP) coordinated the efforts to develop the rules and regulations, systems, and
administrative processes that would govern TTW. A tremendous effort was required to
establish the basic infrastructure needed to administer TTW because the eligibility and
payment rules meant that TTW interacted with every component of the SSI and DI
programs. SSA staff interviewed for this report noted several challenges associated with the
initial Phase 1 implementation.
Short Timeframe and Delayed Rollout. The Program Manager had less than 18
months to develop systems, train staff, and recruit ENs before the first Tickets were released
in February 2002. While SSA ultimately had nearly two and a half years to prepare for
rollout, the required tasks involved building agreement among numerous stakeholders and
making substantial enhancements to SSA systems.
The delayed rollout allowed SSA and the Program Manager more time to test systems
and recruit ENs, but also created inefficiencies. Attempts SSA and Program Manager made
to be ready for targeted start dates that were subsequently delayed with little advanced notice
may have resulted in less than ideal approaches to implementation tasks and the necessity to
spend the extra time fixing and patching those approaches as the system that evolved.
Specifically, having a one-year deadline followed by 18 months of extensions is not the same
as having, with certainty, two and one-half years up front to plan and develop the systems
and procedures. For example, an early decision was made to use SSA’s existing Continuing
Disability Review Control File (CDRCF) as the central piece of software for administering
TTW. But it proved difficult to modify this software to deal with all the issues surrounding
TTW payments, which turned out to be considerably more complex than expected. SSA
staff members that we interviewed believe, in retrospect, that given all the time that was
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III: TTW Early Implementation