Social Security has a manual for its Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR), called HALLEX. Almost two years ago, ODAR basically stopped updating HALLEX, at least so far as one can tell by looking at it online. Clearly, HALLEX is out of date now -- if the publicly available version of HALLEX can be trusted.
What is the explanation? Is HALLEX defunct? Is it still valid, but just not up to date because of lack of manpower at ODAR? Has it been updated, but ODAR is just keeping the updates confidential? Most of Social Security's Emergency Messages are being kept from the public. The only reason that I can imagine for trying to keep them secret is a general increase in pointless federal government secrecy during the Bush Administration. I hope that the answer is not "Well, the updates are really boring and we thought you wouldn't be interested, so we just didn't bother to post them online." You might be amazed at how interested I and other attorneys can be in these boring things, especially when it looks like someone is trying to keep them secret.
What is the explanation? Is HALLEX defunct? Is it still valid, but just not up to date because of lack of manpower at ODAR? Has it been updated, but ODAR is just keeping the updates confidential? Most of Social Security's Emergency Messages are being kept from the public. The only reason that I can imagine for trying to keep them secret is a general increase in pointless federal government secrecy during the Bush Administration. I hope that the answer is not "Well, the updates are really boring and we thought you wouldn't be interested, so we just didn't bother to post them online." You might be amazed at how interested I and other attorneys can be in these boring things, especially when it looks like someone is trying to keep them secret.
2 comments:
there was a much longer hiatus before the last update you are talking about. For hallex to be updated there have to be some major changes. you don't just update something because you haven't got anything better to do. dsi was the last major change, hallex resources had gone to updating hallex for dsi. I don't think I need to say what happened to dsi and why those changes probably weren't updated at the rate one would expect.
CTH says this:
“You might be amazed at how interested I and other attorneys can be in these boring things”
On reflection, I believe this comment qualifies as insightful for a possible explanation of the increasing number of unpublished sensitive instructions.
Discarding all canards, attorneys are devoted to their clients. They are devoted for all possible explanations of why SSA should give prompt favorable attention to their client’s claims, even out of turn. They are also devoted to all possible explanations that unfavorable action by SSA are unjustified.
This works out in favor of protecting internal procedures in two ways:
1. First, if SSA wants to screen cases for those that are candidates for favorable action, SSA would prefer to do this without having to deal with “my client too” arguments that would destroy the efficiency of the entire sceening process.
2. Second, although SSA certainly should publish all adjudicatory criteria, the agency might well favor keeping ad hoc, day to day internal procedures private so as to avoid “got’cha” style arguments that SSA isn’t following internal procedures that it had in fact abandoned.
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