Evaluation of the Ticket to Work Program Initial Evaluation Report

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successfully completing their training, finished presenting training to the Work Incentives
Liaisons by September 30, 2003. The Work Incentives Liaisons will continue to be delegated
work incentive responsibilities in addition to their existing duties, allowing office managers
to better control the priority of work incentives assignments.
The Disability Control File (DCF). 3 SSA had to develop a number of enhancements
to its systems in order to accommodate TTW. The development has occurred, and will
continue to occur in stages. The CDR Control File (CDRCF) was originally created to
control all SSI medical CDRs; limited DI medical CDRs were later included. Initially, Ticket
information and controls were added to the existing file. The Disability Control File (DCF)
was later created from the CDRCF to house all disability information that was needed to
manage work CDRs (that is CDRs initiated because a beneficiary has returned to work),
medical CDRs (regularly scheduled reviews of a beneficiary’s conditions to ensure that they
continue to meet the disability criteria) and the Ticket program. Activities controlled in the
CDRCF were converted into the DCF and the DCF became the file for managing disability
post-entitlement activity. The DCF holds relevant information about Ticket eligibility and
information to administer the TTW. It also contains other post-entitlement disability
information for SSI and DI beneficiaries, medical information, monthly earnings, and work
CDR information. An important feature of the DCF is that it will act as the single
repository for earnings information for both the SSI and DI programs. This level of SSI/DI
data integration is a first at SSA.
Recently, SSA has developed the Modernized Return to Work (MRTW) software to
collect and process information about DI beneficiary work and earnings. MRTW was
developed by staff at the Chicago regional office, in collaboration with Wisconsin-based SSA
staff, as a means to improve the accuracy and reduce the burden and complexity of work
CDRs. The software automates the generation of forms verifying monthly earnings that are
mailed to beneficiaries and employers. The software totals earnings if a beneficiary has
multiple employers, computes gross earnings, and applies the appropriate indexed value for
substantial gainful activity and any special conditions to derive total countable earnings per
month and year. This amount is entered into a desktop application, called the Personal
Computer Continuing Disability Review (PC-CDR), which calculates the trial work period,
substantial gainful activity, and Extended Period of Eligibility months and generates notices
for field personnel. The MRTW information can be fed into PC-CDR to complete the work
CDR process. Currently, MRTW and PC-CDR are not integrated with the national DCF
system, which means that field staff must re-enter earnings data into each system and that
data maintained in MRTW are only available to the local field office using the software.
Under an initiative referred to as eWork, SSA is in the process of combining the MRTW and
PC-CDR. This new software will be an integrated DI “front end” management tool to the
DCF. This front end will have considerably more detail and functionality than the DCF to
help field offices process work reports; (e.g., employer information, earnings tracking, trail
3 As we were finishing this report, SSA re-named this file as the Integrated Disability
Management System.
III: TTW Early Implementation