Delays -- Where Does The Fault Lie?

Tim Moore at My Social Security Disability SSI Blog posts about what has become an all too common problem. A claimant for Social Security disability benefits files a claim or an appeal and the claim or appeal sits for many monhts on the desk of someone at a Social Security field office without being forwarded to the office that is supposed to adjudicate the case. How could this happen? Why would the field office employee not just put the claim or the appeal in an envelope and mail it? The answer is not given by Moore, but it is not too hard to figure out. The problem is that all that information was handwritten by the claimant or their attorney on Social Security's paper forms -- forms that have become longer and longer over the years. Someone at the Social Security field office must then type all that information into Social Security's computer system before sending the information along to an adjudicator. Field office staff has been and is being cut dramatically. No one has time to do all the data entry, so the file sits and sits. This is a significant problem already and threatens to become a horrific problem over the next year, given the near total hiring freeze at Social Security.