Inspector General Report to Commissioner

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) at Social Security has recently issued the Inspector General Statement on the Social Security Administration's Major Management Challenges, a report to the Commissioner of Social Security, including the following recommendation for Social Security's disability program:

SSA needs to continue to improve the process used to determine claimant disability by focusing on initiatives that will improve the timeliness and quality of its services. For example, the Office of Hearings and Appeals’ (OHA) average processing time has increased significantly from 308 days in FY 2001 to 415 days in FY 2005. Further, the hearings pending workload for FY 2005 was 708,164 cases, whereas it was 392,387 cases in FY 2001. This represents an 80 percent increase from FY 2001. SSA’s efforts to address its pending workload did not meet the goals established for FY 2005. In FY 2005, SSA processed 519,359 hearings, approximately 99 percent of its goal of 525,000. Lastly, SSA’s productivity goal in this area for FY 2005 was to process 103 hearings per work year. In FY 2005, it processed 101.7 hearings per work year, under its goal but over the 100.2 hearings processed per work year reached in FY 2004.