TFPA hosts IRS & SSN Executive Frank Bisignao:"Building the Unbreakable"

Thanks for having me.

Well, I wasn't actually thinking about ever doing this. And I was fortunate to receive a phone call that asked me to come see the president-elect, and I did. My wife was usually encouraging. I always had a regret in life, and I tried my hardest to fulfill it in many ways: that I never served in the military. My grandfather came to America and joined the U.S. Army to become a citizen, fought in World War I. My dad was an orphan, fought in World War II, and served the country for 44 years in the Treasury Department. And as life had it, I went on and had a career, and I had the fortunate opportunity to create military programs — a 100,000-jobs mission which turned into two million-plus jobs, bringing people back to work. First programs to award houses to wounded warriors. And when someone, God rest his soul, like General Erdiero, who was the chief of staff, would put his arm around me and thank me for the military programs, I said, 'I won't deserve any thanks. It's all you that deserve the thanks. I have one regret: I've never served.' So I had a wonderful job running a very large company, a very successful company, great bunch of teammates. Anything you get done as a team.

Serving the American public. Serving the American public. You know, in '24, at times it was high as 40 minutes to wait on the phone on average. Average means there were people on there much longer. I got a note this morning: our year-to-date average is 6.9 minutes. So from 40 in '24, at times a full-year average of 28, we're down to less than seven right now. And we're serving way more people. I also realized that we needed to be a digital-first agency. You know, and that would be true at IRS and SSA. We need to transact the way people transact every day. And not everybody wants to come to a field office. So much like in financial institutions, we'd say, 'We're going to meet our clients where they want to be met.' Well, that's our slogan here: we're going to meet our clients where they want to be met. And only 4% of our transactions happen in field offices now, right? And we're going to do over 800 million transactions this year, with, you know, between the phone and the online capability, 96% of those.

Well, you know, it's really interesting. The president asked me to do this job. I was honored to do it. And when I got here, I figured out, like, holy mackerel, the good Lord put me here. The good Lord had given me all this preparedness in big payment companies and big service companies and companies with large branch networks to serve the country. And so it's always about teams for me, and we've put together a great leadership team. The organization now has a little bit of swagger at Social Security, you know, and my definition of swagger is: I get it, you know, north of confident, south of arrogant, but feeling they're winning. They're winning. We took all the inspector general reports, and they said there was about 18 billion of costs being lost, and all of that in a year. There's 300 million left of that.

Well, you know, there is nothing better than preparation. And whether it was the Oight crisis when I was at JPMorgan or 9/11, we always prepared. We actually had a plan for if the towers went down. Now, that did not make us the smartest people in the world, because the towers were bombed once, just like we had a plan for if a bank failed at JPMorgan. Well, we saw the cracking of it in '07 with some failures going on. So, you know, the best way to succeed is to prepare. Then you never know when it's going to happen or how it's going to happen. I'll never forget that morning. I'll never forget where I was. You know, Seven World Trade Center — those people in Seven World Trade were my responsibility. We had 16,000 people in lower Manhattan. We lost six, and I'll never forget that. But we got everybody else out safe, and Seven World Trade Center went to the ground. So I saw the second plane hit. I saw the hole in the first one, and I knew we had to get out of Manhattan.

Well, I think the first thing is there's a wealth of knowledge out on the web in both agencies. I also think there's physical presence that people can come to, and we're always available. And I think, you know, people in both agencies believe they're here to help the American public. And many times these are complicated financial transactions. They're not simple transactions. You know, we have almost a thousand administrative judges who ultimately are the final word arbiters on disability cases. I think for a very long time Social Security was misrepresented in how it was defined up to the day I got there. 74 million Americans receiving $1.6 trillion in benefits. But I just talked about 800 million transactions. Our field office visits are not from the 74 million Americans collecting their payments. They're from everybody — from someone who needs a replacement card to get their first job and working papers, to someone who just got married and their name changed, to someone who needs a document and they don't have a printer at home and they want to print out what their actual Social Security benefit is or their income. People going online changing their address. And so we serve over 300 million Americans. We serve over 300 million Americans, and we're in 100% of America's retirement plans. And on top of it, we have — and today, 104 million digital users. We are the largest digital financial institution in the world. I like that definition better. And yes, we are paying 74 million Americans 1.6 trillion. It was trivializing the workforce. The workforce likes my definition better because it defines what they do, not some component of it. I'm not making the payment. By the way, you know, the world's much different. People used to, you know, in '35 we wrote out checks. Today, 99% are direct deposit from the computer.

I think what they'll say is we converted to modern-day transformation, like every American is being used to be served in every other way they act, and that their books and records were accurate. We reconciled the Social Security number database. It was never called that. It was called the Numidant. And everybody questioned, you know, the president saying people are 160 years old, they were on the file. Well, they were — there was more than a 10% error rate on that file. It had never — that's on 300-plus million records. Right. And so we created a risk department. This is where a life — there's no substitute for experience. My friends always laugh, people who I worked with 40 years, 30 years, 20 years ago, and I always say — well, they say, 'Why didn't that person know it?' I said, 'They never had the experience.' It's true in the private sector. Well, it's true everywhere in life.

Well, you know, one of the most — I took a month and a half before I announced one change organizationally, and instead I announced a whole new organization. And I took a judge in the disability group that was acting over a portion of it, Judge J., and I told him he was going to be on the cover of Disability Weekly. That's a paper I made up. I don't think it exists. But he was highly motivated. I said we're going to run a front-to-back organizational structure. There's never been one person in charge of the whole organization. And as he said, he brought some bread-and-butter management to it. We brought technology to it. We run the whole org with a discipline that you would in the private sector. You know, a weekly key indicator meeting across the whole org that covers 270 indicators. I sit in it, and every chief that reports to me does. So their numbers are front and center, and the people underneath come and present their data, and we help them solve their problems, right? We're not there as bureaucrat administrators, overseers. No, we like to roll up our sleeves to get work done, and we now have a leadership team that does it. So, you know, I give a big shout-out to Judge J. He obviously was originally a judge and came through the ranks of the disability — it was never all one organizational structure.

Well, I always think source data drives everything. You know, I ran companies called like First Data. I mean, we had 40% of the payment records. If you don't have every one of them right — we ultimately created an index called the Small Business Index. We thought America wanted to know how small businesses are doing, right? So those were things. And when I looked at this, this is a data-rich environment. We have, by the letter of the law, created more data-sharing agreements than ever before across the federal government. That's the great leadership of President Trump. You know, bring people who want to work together to get better outcomes. So I thought — by the way, the name of the Social Security number database was the Numidant. Did you ever hear of the Numidant? Is that a word you would know? Somebody's like, 'We're checking the Numidant.' I'm like, 'What's the Numidant?' They told me. I said, 'That's the Social Security number database. Has it been reconciled?' No. Okay. We're going to have a risk group that'll reconcile it. By the way, there's nothing unusual about that. Somebody else from my background would have made the same exact decision.

Well, you know, why am I keep talking about the Social Security number database? You know, it didn't mean that people were getting Social Security payments. It meant they had a number that was live in a system that they could use that wasn't them. Really, that's what the real crime was. And that's why when you hear — I mean, the work that goes on in IRS, we have a great crowd, you know, civil, criminal investigators who go after fraud. And now the way we've structured, you know, under Vice President Vance, you know, the fraud task force, it's bringing all of it together. You know, if you were running a company, you would bring everything together to find your issues. You just don't do it in a corner here or a corner there. First time in the history of America you've seen this attack plan for the betterment of citizens. You'll end up with less identity theft here.

Well, I think a couple of things. I mean, AI — you could go back and see me seven years ago saying, you know, or five years ago too, where I was using AI before it was called AI. So, you know, it's technology, right? It's just hypercharged. You remember when everybody — it was like, you know, the internet, right? It was e-everything, but then it became normal. So it's super-advanced technology that allows it to learn. But for us across the government, you know, and I could speak specifically for IRS and Social Security, it's transformative. I mean, AI is about how we went from 40 minutes — but you had to have some other base technology too. You just can't pop up and say AI is going to solve everything. I think in Social Security, people would say, 'Oh, CIO, great guy.' I was talking to him at 6:45 this morning, Mike Russo, is the first CIO who actually was a technologist. So putting people in jobs and his ability to do things for us to get information to better serve the American public. Now you'd say we're going to use a lot of AI in all processes, but ultimately we have a human at the end of it. Right. You need to make sure that output product is right. But it takes all the labor that went into it, right? And so what do you do? Are you going to get rid of a bunch of people? No. You're going to provide better service. No. You're going to reconcile all the records. You're going to get the work done that was supposed to be done that wasn't being done.

Well, you know, I've come here with one mantra: protect and preserve. And the president's mantra: protect and preserve. And all these building blocks. You know, when I go in and we're going to fix a company, the first thing I do is make sure the operations can work, right? Your operations got to be first class. If you're paying out 74 million Americans, 1.6 trillion, right? So before you think about how you're going to move forward, I want to give us a platform that we have to move forward off of. And we're winning that war. And with it, we're extending — little, you know, when you change all these numbers, we got a lot of work to do to understand what the next steps are. But we're empowering — we're going to empower the country to have this forever.

Well, you know, the thing is like — it's a new language. Like Numidant, that was a new language, right? Numerous people use it. All these people talked about, like, why did it take, you know, 90 years for somebody to say that's a Social Security number database, right? You know, it's not because I grew up in Brooklyn. You know, it's just appropriate. So where I'm going with that is people would always say, well, policy — people tell me policy, and be like, well, I never had a policy department before. But you have to get these people to buy in. Yeah, well, they buy in because they actually want to win. They actually want to win. They wanted to work. Yeah. They didn't want to be kicked around, you know. Oh, you know, think about it. I really believe an injustice was done saying Social Security pays 74 million Americans, where meanwhile we have 880 million transactions, 100 million digital users, and it's the number one identifier. So they were like, 'Wow, he's talking about the work we do now, not the output for people who paid into it for years.' There's a lot to this leading. You know, you can't really teach it. You got to learn it in the trenches. How to get people galvanized against an effort to get a better outcome that makes them feel better about themselves. The person who ran — there was never a risk department. I've never run an organization that didn't have a risk department. So I created a risk department. And I put a career person in the job. And I was talking about this the other day and the work done on this Social Security number database. The fact we have a Friday afternoon at three meeting on any open audit issue. I go to these meetings. I'm in these meetings. I don't delegate it. I want to hear what the people in the org have to say. By the way, I'll audit. Yeah. Well, I don't know that they always love me for being that accessible, you know, because I'm a tough head coach.

Well, yeah. I mean, I said this — they said I spied on Charlie Sharf. Charlie called me the evening before it was out because it was in the digital version that night, and him and I had a good laugh about it. We're good friends. And I said, you know, it's going to be pretty cool for my grandkids. You know, they're going to look through Pop Pop — that's who I am to them, five of them. They're going to look 40 years from now. They're all under six, and go, 'Man, Pop Pop, he was a CEO, great business career. He was a level-one officer in the federal government. And he spied.' I mean, you know, like, of course not, you know, but it's kind of funny. So we laughed about it. How do these stories get life? Well, they got somebody who wants to say something. No-name sources. JPMorgan denies it. We deny it. Everybody says it didn't happen, but they're going to run a story anyway because I work for the president. If I was running Catholic Charities, we probably wouldn't have got that story.

Calabria and Bari. I've been back to both towns that my family is from. I grew up in a multi-generational immigrant household. My Italian grandfather always spoke Italian in the house.

My dad worked 44 years for the federal government. I know all about federal government employees. I have a bias towards federal government employees.

He was in Treasury. But that was pre-Homeland Security. But he was in Treasury. Yeah. He was a customs agent. He was border patrol. He was an inspector. He was DEA. And he loved his job. He loved his job. And when I came on the scene and I walked into an auditorium with a bunch of Social Security employees, I said, 'I have a bias towards federal employees.' And they're like, 'Big businessman.' Exactly. My role model, my dad.

Mom was a homemaker till I was 14, and I was the youngest. An older sister who we talk all the time, and we love each other a lot. And mom then decided she wanted to go to work, and that was a little — you know, we're in the '70s, and you know, we're an Italian household, and mom's going to go get a job. And so she learns how to type. She taught herself how to type at home and put together a little journal for something called the Rudder Club. It was maritime. A cousin of ours got her this little gig. And what happens from the gig is mom — mom was really smart. She was the brains of the outfit. And dad had instincts that were unparalleled, being one of 15 and an orphan when he was eight. And so mom then gets a phone call from a Stevedorian company. And Stevedorian may be like Numidant to some people. They're water cranes that take huge bulk off cargo ships in ports. And so mom gets a call, and she's — we live in Brooklyn. She's going to go down and work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a Stevedorian company as a receptionist. When mom passes, she's still, you know, going to work. Dad took care of her, got her back and forth. She had a Parkinson-like disease. She was the chief operating officer of that company. And you know, she dealt with a longshoreman. She dealt with a nice, wonderful, beautiful woman who just knew how to keep it together.

It was a blowout season. It was — you know, if you think about it, I think of everything like we say season. I love sports. I mean, everything's about teams for me. And there were — both at Social Security and in IRS, there were a lot of people before me in a short period of time. So however you want to think about it, I was called the fifth person from the start of the administration. I get there on October 6th, and we got to deliver a tax season. The changes in OBBBA were enacted in July. It's going to be a tough tax season to put in, and those were tax changes. And the team was already — you know, they were heads down, knowing they — you know, we have great seasoned executives on the tech side and the taxpayer service side. But you know, I brought a different skill set to be a leader there, not a bureaucrat or just an administrator. And we said we were going to commit to single-digit wait times. We're going to do efficient — remember, everybody's worried there were 25,000 less people, and we're going to have the biggest tax changes that ever occurred, landmark legislation. How are we going to service it? And we made a series of changes. We built that same process that I talked about at SSA that I would do running a company, created a risk job. It decided how we were going to treat the call centers differently, bringing in more technology, being able to, you know, deliver. And you know, we were holding ourselves accountable to getting these refunds out early. And you know, when you looked at the tail of the tape when it was over, the most refunds, the most dollars ever paid, paid quicker to more people, billions of dollars above what anyone even thought it was going to be. You know, the amount of it — it's just, I mean, yesterday we were finishing up the first time that leadership team at IRS has sat at a table for a strategy meeting since the last decade.