Congressional Response Report: Progress in Developing the Disability Case Processing System as of March 2017
April 06, 2017
Office Affiliation: The Office of Audit
Audit Report Number: A-14-17-50079
We issued this audit to evaluate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) progress in developing and implementing its Disability Case Processing System (DCPS) as of March 2017.
SSA partners with State disability determination services (DDS) to evaluate disability claims and make disability determinations. The DDSs use various customized systems to process disability cases.
DCPS is an SSA initiative to develop a common system for all DDSs that the Agency expects will simplify system support and maintenance, improve the speed and quality of the disability process, and reduce the overall growth rate of infrastructure costs. SSA is using an Agile approach to developing DCPS. The Agency continually identifies functional requirements that are expressed as user stories. Each user story is assigned a level of effort, called a story point. Velocity refers to the number of story points completed during an iteration, or 'sprint." User stories that need to be addressed are considered the backlog.