I’m home visiting Minnesota for a few days and helping my Mom get her taxes pulled together (and our own taxes). It’s funny to be working on this stuff when the headlines are filled with articles talking about cuts to IRS and SSA staff, amid accusations of widespread waste & inefficiency.
Here’s our situation. My Mom gets Social Security every month. It always arrives on-time as it efficiently arrives by direct deposit into her bank account on the first business day of the month.
Now that it is tax time, we need to submit her SSA-1099 form to the IRS, so they can see what she was paid. The only problem is that we don’t have it. Nothing arrived in the mail for her. I don’t think they even have her correct address, since she has moved apartments a few times in the past couple years. There also should be a SSA-1099 for my Dad, but he passed away last June and who knows where that tax form went.
Our accountant says she really needs the forms and there’s no way through her tax software for her to get it. I went on the SSA website and tried to register my Mom, but it didn’t work. I’m sure I have the right information it asked for – full name, address, Social Security number, and birthdate, but it says the information is “incorrect”. In fact, it’s now locked me out for 24 hours after I resubmitted it a few times. Frustrating.
I’m guessing THEY have the wrong address for her, so that’s why they are saying it is wrong. We have no other mail from them showing what address they have. We’ll have try to call them on the phone tomorrow. I’m sure that will go well!
After wasting 45 minutes on it today, I thought how idiotic this situation is. THEY already know what she was paid by Social Security, but now SHE needs to get a form from THEM to send to THEM?! Across America, 73 million people are on Social Security and have to repeat this Federal nonsense every year of their lives?
I’m no DOGE expert, but why can’t ONE of the 90,000 IRS employees simply walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to Social Security HQ and get a spreadsheet from one of the 60,000 Social Security employees? Send 100 employees, if necessary. I’m sure that’s too easy for our bureaucrats. (To put the number of Federal employees in these departments in perspective, the entire Mastercard company has less than 35,000 employees that process a whopping 175 billion transactions a year. That’s about 200x the volume of Social Security).
What entertaining experiences are you having during tax season 2025?
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MrFireStation 
Hi Mr Fire Station,
Hope you are doing well! I know
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Hi Mr. Fire Station,
Thanks for sharing your experience. As frustrating as all of this is to you, it is incredibly frustrating for the Federal Government employees as well. We would love to modernize and give better service, but are handtied by politicians and political appointees creating cumbersome rules, regulations, and general roadblocks.
Unfortunately, DOGE and the Trump administration is doing nothing to fix these problems. Instead they are firing the small staff that we already have. This is making everything slower and significantly more stressful for everyone. I wish you the best but fear everything is going to get worse for a while.
Please remember that Federal Employees are people too. I hope you never experience the current hatred and vitrol we are facing. I have been amazed by the comments that people have made to me in front of my children. I love America and took a substantial pay cut to work for the Federal Goverment. I did this to help make America the best country that I can.
I have tried posting a couple of comments to your blog lately and for some reason they haven’t been posting. Are you having a problem seeing them? Do you need me to resend them? My comments are only meant to share a different perspective with you. I have always admired how you share your thoughts with everyone and wanted to share mine with you and the rest of your readers.
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Appreciate the thoughts PYFGE! Yes, I’ve been through a couple experiences where MegaCorps completely modernized their enterprise-wide software. One went really well, one was very difficult. Most private companies upgraded to tools like SAP around 2000. I guess it’s no surprise that the government is a generation behind. Efficiency comes at the cost of jobs, and government is often a jobs program.
As with any stereotype, the picture of a lazy government worker doesn’t apply to most people that hold those jobs. that said, it is a stereotype that is indelibly imprinted in most cultures. I am afraid the bad apples have poisoned civil service for everyone else.
For what it’s worth, I do see a lot of sympathy for federal workers caught up in all of the DOGE efforts. Keep in mind that those that stay will have it rough at first, but then more opportunity to make improvements and to move up faster. I saw it happen a dozen times in my career.
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Here is another recent example from my interactions with FEMA, which is another Federal Government entity.
Due to the Palisades Fire, my family was evacuated from our home for 24 days. I applied for lodging assistance from FEMA due to loss of use. They approved me. Two days later I was contacted from someone from Hilton and we determined that all their rooms in the area were already filled, so I just started kept on extending my Marriott reservation for additional weeks at a time. The Marriot was very accommodating and waived all cleaning fees associated with our Rottweiler and Doberman. They even waived parking for three vehicles. We evacuated as a convey, to avoid the possibility of losing our house and multiple cars.
I uploaded my Marriott receipts onto FEMA’s website on February 2nd. The website says to allow up to ten days for the receipts to be reviewed and processed. I checked this morning and we just hit 40 days against the 10 day SLA with no evidence the receipts have been touched. I have tried calling FEMA a couple times and escalating to a supervisor and they tell me that my case has been assigned to a caseworker. The people who answer the phone don’t seem to actually be doing anything.
Compare this with your typical bank or credit card call center where you call in and the people you speak with are empowered to do transactions on your behalf to clear up problems most times during the first call. My career was about automating systems and processes in corporate America. Sounds like you did some of this yourself. From our interactions with the Federal Government Departments and experience in Corporate America, we can see that they are ripe for systems upgrades and process changes.
If the Federal Government was a private business that provides this same level of bad customer service their customers would leave and they would soon be out of business. Us taxpayers are the Federal Government’s customers and we deserve better customer service.
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Agree (overall). I actually just had a knockdown-drag out battle with AmEx customer service, but they did come through in the end. Wish me luck with SSA – I’m dreading it.
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I finally got a call today from the FEMA caseworker assigned to my case at 6:40 am this morning. I was already up, but most people aren’t. This call finally came six weeks and one day against the ten day SLA indicated on their website.
FEMA Caseworker: “My receipt didn’t have addresses listed on it.”
Me: “I uploaded a one page summary to make her job easier. I also uploaded 13 pages of receipts that show the addresses.”
FEMA Caseworker: “Oh I see it now. But I need separate receipts for each hotel.”
Me: “How about I print the two documents to separate Print-to-PDFs and upload them while you wait? You can review these on the fly and we can get this case closed during this call.”
FEMA Caseworker: “I cannot do that because it takes three days for the documents to be viewable by me.”
There is so much badness going on here. I didn’t get called until six weeks and day against a ten day SLA. I got called at 6:40 am. The caseworker couldn’t handle two documents appended as a single PDF. It takes FEMA three days for my uploaded documents to be viewable. You would almost have to go out your way to design a more convoluted process. My observation is those who spend their time managing a worklist soon have a job where the majority of their time is spent managing the queue instead of getting real work down.
And, Trump and Musk are bad because they want to change this to save our country from becoming bankrupt. Kudos to Trump and Musk for bringing back the astronauts who were trapped on the International Space Station for eights months on an eight day mission.
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It must be painful to work in such an environment. The bosses must be completely asleep at the wheel or completely uncaring of how they serve the public.
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Big fan of Mr. Fire Station here but I dont think these recent posts have been particularly accurate. Some of these comparisons are wildly misleading. Mastercard is a payment processor with 35,000 employees. The government’s payment processor is the Bureau of Fiscal Services which has less then 2,000 employees (not the Social Security Administration). Additionally this argument that the federal government is massively inefficient is just a talking point for so many people. For instance, administrative costs for Medicare are only 2% of its spending while private sector health insurance has administrative costs of 17%.
Just some additional things to consider.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20110920.013390/
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Appreciate the perspective. Sorry if Mastercard wasn’t a good example – I tried to simply think of another group that handles a lot of payments. Still, there’s no question that the Federal government is incredibly behind in modernizing its I.T. Toolbox to allow Social Security & IRS to improve efficiency for taxpayers.
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Chief,
Really interesting comment by someone who I don’t remember ever seeing post before. It appears that it is Federal Worker, perhaps even associated with SSA?
I will share a couple experiences I have had working with the Social Security Administration, and hopefully it helps you resolve your Mom’s dilemma.
Back in late 2022, my wife received notice of a really high IRMAA amount for for 2022. IRMAA is an acronym for income-related monthly adjustment amount. IRMAA is a Medicare surcharge or premium that is based on your annual income for two year’s ago. My wife and I were planning to retire in 2020, and my Deferred Compensation Payments had already started.
Then COVID-19 came. There was a major stock market correction and we couldn’t travel anyway. So we kept working from home until the COVID-19 lockdowns blew over. We ended up working the entire year while getting retirement payments. This created a distortion in the annual earnings.
I filled out an SSA form to base IRMAA on our lower actual 2022 income. This request was denied. We tried calling the National Numbers listed on SSA’s website and seemed to get people who could talk to us, but didn’t do anything to fix the problem. Finally, we were able to resolve our issue with IRMAA by calling our local Social Security Office and speaking with a caseworker who helped get our IRMAA corrected.
Looks like you have a local office. https://ssofficelocation.com/offices/minnesota/minneapolis/minneapolis-social-security-office-55404/
My wife will receive her first Social Security Payment next month. When she tried to apply over the phone in December, she got no where. I tried helping her get online and we couldn’t get her logged into the Social Security Website, even though she had an active Medicare website for the past five years. We called technical support and they told us her account isn’t locked.
I was finally able to get her online by using the Microsoft Edge browser instead of Chrome or Firefox. Here is what happened. When you try to logon https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action you now have to use the Federal Government’s Single Sign-On Service at Login.gov. When I tried logging in for the first time on Login.gov using either Chrome or Firefox, we didn’t receive a token that is required to access the system for the first time. The error message that we got using either Chrome or Firefox said that the system was locked, even though it really wasn’t. Apparently the initial account setup and sign-on function and it’s proper communication with SSA’s website was not tested across all browsers. My recommendation is trying to use Microsoft Edge to access the SSA website URL listed above.
I do my wife and my taxes as well as helping my three sons with theirs. Sometimes you need to override the tax software’s automation, bypass the OCR and enter numbers manually. Worst comes to worst, do a search on your Mom’s bank account for the Social Security Direct Deposits. You will need to add up the payments plus add the deductions for Medicare Part B and IRMAA, plus any taxes that were withheld. You will be okay as long as the numbers match.
Since we are in a disaster area, we have until October 15 to file our taxes. This extension seems to be ongoing.
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Thanks, Klaus! I’ll try that browser trick this afternoon and/or call that Minneapolis office. I think it’s going to be a long afternoon!
I’m happy to hear from these readers that are in the Federal system. They bring a unique perspective, but at the end of the day we are all stuck with this incredibly inefficient bureaucracy. I had heard early on that DOGE was going to focus on technology solutions to simplify government processes. Lately, just crickets on that front. It’ll be a Herculean effort if they do get after it, but we will all benefit.
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Nothing is worse than being setup for failure by not being given the right tools to do your job. Making headcount cuts before getting better systems in place seems off, but I am not the richest man on the world.
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I made a switch to Chase back in 1984 after having a horrible customer service experience with B of A Visa fighting me on handling a dispute. B of A was too merchant friendly to the detriment of customers like me. My preference is Chase’s no annual fee Sapphire and their Amazon Rewards Cards with lots of rewards points that I covert to cash back every month.
Chase has really treated me well. I have never had a dispute decided against me and they have outstanding security. I cannot think of a single instance where anyone ever got a single buck from them in a fraudulent transaction. Sometimes they would even call me when I was a road warrior and ask, “Is that really you down in Buenos Aires? Yes, it’s me.” They also contact me when there is suspected fraud.
I cannot say the same about AMEX which Costco used to provide and were provided to me as Corporate Cards sometimes.
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I also have a Chase / Amazon card that I use for online stuff. 5% back on Amazon purchases is terrific. Do the same at Target with their Red card.
While our Amazon Reserve (purple) Delta card is expensive ($600/year), we get 1 free flight, $200 hotel credit, seat upgrades, and SkyClub access. That’s worth it for me.
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You are mining cards for rebates and points much more than me. My oldest son does the same and tracks it on spreadsheets.
I should figure out if it is worth my time to more aggressively harvest points. I think I am getting a couple grand per year tax free. Can I get more? And is it worth it?
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I don’t do a lot of it. My dear wife keeps me to a 2 card maximum since she pays the bills and doesn’t want the extra work!
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