(REMARKS AS PREPARED)

Thank you and congratulations Mr. Chairman.  I look forward to the good work we will accomplish together.

I also want to welcome our new members and our colleagues from the Income Security and Family Support Subcommittee. 

We all share a real concern about the delays our constituents face when they visit or contact a local Social Security office, call the 800 number or wait over 16 months for a decision on their disability appeal before an administrative law judge. 

At the same time, efforts to address program waste, fraud and abuse have been curtailed, costing billions in improper payments while reducing taxpayer confidence that their hard-earned payroll tax dollars will provide the services they paid for and deserve.

This Committee has worked on a bipartisan basis to obtain needed funding for the Social Security Administration.  In the last two years Congress sent an additional $275 million to the agency above the President’s request. 

In the economic stimulus package, Social Security received an additional $1 billion for a new computer center and to help process the growing number of applications for retirement and disability benefits.

Now the Agency must step up and account for how this money will translate into real results.   

In the short-term, Social Security must answer their phones, reduce wait times for people in local Social Security offices, and tell people sooner whether their application for Social Security benefits has been granted or denied – at all levels in the process.

Whether Social Security can get the job done depends in large part on their having state-of-the-art computers driven by the latest, proven software. 

Far from state-of-the-art, Social Security’s main computer systems are stuck in the past.  

Social Security’s main database still operates using 1950’s technology, including COBOL programming language.  Social Security is working to replace this language but that project won’t be done until 2014. 

Last year we learned the Agency’s 30-year old Computer Center will be unable to carry its load after 2012. 

In the meantime, a second data center has been built in Durham, North Carolina to run some of the Agency’s daily work and to temporarily step in to keep basic operations running if needed. 

However, Durham will not be fully operational until 2012 and may not be able to cover all the Agency’s computing needs.  

At the same time, Social Security now faces the difficult task of purchasing a new computer center using the $500 million they just received.

Going forward, Social Security cannot get this wrong.  So I want the Commissioner to tell us his plan for maintaining agency computer operations while finishing the Durham Data Center and building the new computer center. 

I thank our witnesses for being here today and look forward to hearing their testimony.