Newly-sworn in Social Security commissioner Frank Bisignano spelled out the agency’s plans to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, and protect the agency from a looming threat of insolvency that some say could come within the next ten years.
The Fiserv CEO told “Sunday Morning Futures” this week that he’s “honored” to be a part of the team President Donald Trump has put together, and improving the safety and security of the agency ranks among the highest priorities.
“I think is, the team that oversees the Social Security Trust, which I’m one of – the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services – we as a team will get together… probably in the next couple months, [to] go through the information that’s produced. This is [an] effort across the board that will also involve Senate and Congress,” Bisignano said.
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“I think doing our job right is accretive to this economic challenge. It’s been a 90-year-old institution, and as the president has said… we have no intent to break a system that can be improved, but we have no intent to break it, and I do believe that that team that will get together, along with the Senate and Congress, will ensure that this is here for the next 90 years, at least.”
Bisignano sees a “tremendous opportunity” to improve the agency by focusing on the “integrity,” “safety and security” of Social Security numbers.
He went on to call Trump’s team the “best that’s ever been assembled.”
Bisignano’s remarks came after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently lambasted him in a press briefing as “Mr. Slash and Burn” for allegedly making sizable cuts to organizations in the private sector.
“Can you imagine putting this man, who has no experience, with Social Security, but who has experience in cutting the daylights out of any organization that he becomes part of, being the commissioner…?” Schumer said.
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Bisignano told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that the integrity of data within Social Security is “job one,” “whether it’s a payment or whether it’s how that number travels through a system.”
“Fraud and abuse can happen so many ways, so job one’s going to be ensuring that Social Security numbers are only given out and maintained to people who should have them,” he explained.
“I think we need to think broader about what Elon and DOGE and the president were talking about. It’s not as simple as did a 150-year-old get a payment? It can be as simple as, did that number travel through the system and [can] still be alive and used for many other things?”
He called the agency’s one percent error rate for improper payments “not acceptable.”
“If you think about your own financial transactions, if you had a one percent error rate on them, or your own data integrity… you would really feel like you were at risk, so we need to shut down all the avenues where these errors happen, and that is fraud, waste and abuse.”
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