Lisa De Soto At NOSSCR Conference

Lisa De Soto, Social Security's Deputy Commissioner for the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR), spoke today at the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) conference in St. Louis. Here are some points that I picked up from her presentation, with my comments in brackets:

• There were 18,000 cases remanded with 8,600 allowances under the "informal remand" [or re-recon] process in the fiscal year that ended September 30, 2007.
• ODAR has 144,000 cases that have been waiting for a hearing for 900 days or more. [Good Lord, that is a huge number.]
• ODAR has 1,045 Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) on duty now. [I believe that is down about 50 in the last six months or so -- ordinary attrition.]
• The new register from which ALJs can be hired should be available later this month.
• Only 92 additional staff members are to be hired to support the ALJs. [Since ODAR hiring along with all Social Security hiring is frozen as a general matter, this means that the support staff at ODAR will decline over the course of this fiscal year, since 92 will not be enough to replace ordinary attrition.]
• De Soto does not expect the new ALJs to be able to produce many decisions until near the end of this fiscal year (September 30, 2008).
• De Soto plans a November 1, 2007 "kickoff" for the Senior Attorney program.
• By the end of this month, ODAR will send out "guidance" to the ALJs to require them to hear and decide 500-700 cases per year.
• De Soto also mentioned the 11 actions brought before the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) against ALJs this year and promised to "keep it up."
• She expects rules to be issued soon to require 75 day notice of ALJ hearings and to require that all evidence be submitted five days before ALJ hearings. These new rules will also "close the record" after an ALJ decision.
• ALJs at the new national hearings center at ODAR headquarters will supervise the attorneys who write the decisions for them. [This makes these ALJs supervisory personnel who would be ineligible to join a union. Was there an anti-ALJ flavor to her remarks? Absolutely.]
• If the national hearings center works, there may be an expansion to regional hearings centers.
• Currently there are 160,000 "unpulled" cases at ODAR. [If you do not know what "unpulled" means, well, the subject may not be important to you anyway.] Social Security has signed a contract for "e-pulling" of files. E-pulling should begin nationally by June 2008.
• The pilot for a program to allow attorneys to review online the files of their clients should begin in June 2008.
• By October 2008, ODAR should have many new things in place.
• De Soto favors an expansion of video hearings. De Soto refused to answer a question asking whether she expects local hearing offices to "wither away." I do not mean that she evaded the question. She said specifically that she was refusing to answer the question. [My congratulations to the person who asked this question.]
  
• De Soto said that she would not eliminate the right of a Social Security claimant to refuse a video hearing.