Thursday, December 07, 2006

Government In Action. Corporate Inaction.

Back in September I began hearing rumors that The Corporation was screwing up reporting employee incomes to the Social Security Administration. There were lots of rumors about a lot of screw ups but I didn't follow up on it right away. As the reports got more prevalent, I finally contacted the SSA to get a reprint of my statement to be sure everything was OK.

It wasn't.

The Corporation had reported my income for 2004 as zero. That means that any Social Security benefits I might have earned for that period of time will also be zero.

Two weeks ago, after I received the confirmation of the screw-up, I went to the Operations Manager to have her initiate and investigation, or whatever it is that HR would call such an action. And, having zero confidence that The Corporate Overlords would actually take any sort of action, I contacted the Social Security Administration directly. Their solution was a simple as me mailing them a copy of my W-2, having then check it against a database, and amending my earnings statement.

From my phone call to them to my receipt of issue resolution took fifteen days. That includes the time the letters were in transit and the long Thanksgiving weekend. A spectacular response, given that the person I spoke to said that it could take up to 90 days.

As to my own Corporate HR. . . I'm going to let this sit to find out just how long it takes them to try to address this. I suspect that it is some large number approaching infinity. They are three months overdue for my performance appraisal. When they screwed up my occupation taxes it took the better part of a year for them to do anything and that took my pestering them and a phone call to the City tax auditor to get them moving. If I'm lucky, they'll eventually come back and say, "We couldn't find anything wrong."

"Of course," I'll say. "Based on past experience I expected you to drop the ball so I called the Feds myself and took care of it for you. They took less than two weeks to take care of it. Why did it take you as long as you did?"

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