The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) made recommendations to the Congress to change the statement issued by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to 140 million workers, largely based of Dalbar’s evaluation and Trends & Best Practices report. This report, released in April 2005, used Dalbar’s evaluation to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current SSA statement and incorporated the recommendations made in the evaluation.

Before preparing its report, the GAO undertook a national consumer survey, six focus groups and interviewed officials from other countries, leading pension plan providers and consultants. The results confirmed Dalbar's findings and recommendations. The GAO report states, “The benefits consulting firm (Dalbar) that evaluated the statement, like the focus group participants, found the statement was weak in design and conveying financial planning information. The firm (Dalbar) designated the statement as good...” The report also said “The benefits consulting firm (Dalbar) recommended improvements that focus on meeting recipients’ information needs, increasing readership, minimizing unnecessary inquiries at SSA, and increasing the savings rate among U.S. citizens.”

The GAO acknowledged the value as well at the limitations of using the consumer survey in the statement, “Although these survey results are generally useful, if they are used as the only evaluation, they may not provide the depth and detail needed to assess the understandability of each individual section of the statement.”

The GAO selected the top rated defined benefit statements for their study. According to the report “…we first selected the top three statement preparers as ranked by Dalbar. We used Dalbar’s 2003 ranking for defined benefit plan statements, which ranked CIGNA, Principal, and MassMutual as the top three preparers of defined benefit pension plan statements.”

In explaining their use of Dalbar the GAO report stated that “We also contracted with a nationally recognized benefit statement evaluation firm, Dalbar Inc., to evaluate and score the statement based on the firm’s criteria for private sector benefit statements.”

Dalbar, Inc., the nation’s leading financial-services market research firm, is committed to raising the standards of excellence in the financial-services industry. With offices in both the US and Canada, Dalbar develops standards for, and provides research, ratings, and rankings of intangible factors to the mutual fund, broker/dealer, discount brokerage, life insurance, and banking industries.  They include investor behavior, customer satisfaction, service quality, communications, Internet services, and ratings of financial-professionals.