The Social Security Administration is making progress in its efforts to achieve a supervisor-to-staff ratio of 1-to-15 by the end of fiscal year 1999, the General Accounting Office has reported.
By the end of fiscal 1998, the agency had reduced its supervisor-to-employee ratio to 1-to-12.4 from about 1-to-7 in fiscal 1994, according to the GAO report (HEHS-99-43R). SSA has cut the number of supervisory employees at GS-12 and above from 6,800 in 1994 to 4,000 last year.
In September 1993, the National Performance Review, now the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, recommended reducing the number of management positions across the government in an attempt to streamline the bureaucracy. The NPR said the government could save $40 billion by eliminating at least 252,000 federal non-supervisory and supervisory positions over five years.
SSA has used a variety of methods to reduce its staff: early retirements, employee buyouts and reassignment of supervisory staff to newly created nonsupervisory positions.
Since 1993, SSA has created 1,900 new nonsupervisory positions-550 team leader positions in headquarters and 1,350 management support specialists and area systems coordinator positions in field offices.
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