Easier acces to My SSA Accounts

Good evening, SOAR Superstars!

I hope you are all doing well! Things have stayed very busy here at the State, but I have been amazed and excited watching all of the progress we continue to make with SOAR across Virginia.

SSA released a new process for assisting individuals with verifying their identity. This new process assists with creating a My SSA Account by using ID.me to verify the client's identity. It will ask you to take a picture of the front and back of the ID and upload it. It will then ask you to take a selfie of the applicant and upload it. The entire process takes about 5 minutes but will require that you have a smart phone or computer with a camera available to use.

You will still access this process by starting the online disability application or logging into/creating your My SSA Acount. The system is setup to access you these questions automatically. We encourage you to use this process when completing the online SSA-16 (Disability Application) and SSA-3368 (Disability Report). It will assist SSA in establishing an earlier Protected Filing Date and result in less work for SOAR workers and local SSA workers. We also encourage you to use this process when you need to verify benefits or print off a statement for clients and the client has not yet established a My SSA account.

Please reach out to Georgi or your Local Leads with any questions about this new process. I look forward to hearing how this is working for each of you. It is my hope that we will see this process increase the number of SOAR clients with My SSA accounts.