ODAR Overstaffed? Work Left Undone? SSA Employees Ovepaid?

From the minutes of the March 4, 2008 meeting of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations, an organization of Social Security management personnel, but which has few members from Social Security's Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) I would guess (emphasis added):

Welcome and Report on Meeting with Commissioner Astrue (Greg Heineman and Bethany Paradis):

Bethany and Greg met with Commissioner Astrue on March 3rd. The Commissioner expressed his appreciation of the excellent job NCSSMA has done both in terms of making sure Congress is aware of the effects of the SSA budget on our ability to serve the public and in communicating to CO [Central Office] the unfiltered voice of field and TSC [Teleservice Center] management . The March 3rd meeting included a host of individuals including Linda McMahon, Lisa DeSoto, David Foster, Dr. Wells and others. The Commissioner covered various topics while Linda provided support and David Foster asked clarifying questions. The Commissioner was receptive to what Greg and Bethany had to say on the five discussion topics.

As far as actual input of the discussion, the first question dealt with distribution of staff. Because of major interest in Washington on ODAR backlogs, ODAR will actually hire approximately 175 new ALJs, up from the 150 initially recommended. The total optimum number of ALJs is 1250, but ODAR should have about 1175 ALJs by the end of the year. It appears that ODAR is in adequate shape in terms of support staff. Support is currently at about 4.4 employees for every ALJ. The union is advocating for more, but ultimately the result may be 4 employees for every ALJ. Almost half of the support staff needed to pull paper files and organize the material will have less and less paper to handle as the transition is made to electronic files. This will allow for different distribution of support staff among ALJs. ...

In addition, there are high volumes of work that we can’t do because priorities are on clearing integrity workloads. Last year we had 3300 work years of additional workloads; this year 4800 work years of additional workloads. The truth is, we will not be able to do all of this work with current resource levels. We only have enough funding to complete what have been identified as integrity workloads: redeterminations, limited issue cases, medical CDRs, etc. Some errors will never be corrected because of the inability to address approximately 8100 work years of additional workloads. ...

The last staffing replacement rate was1 hire for every 2 losses. This year, all operations components may get 7 hires for every 10 losses. Other components may still only receive 1 hire for every 2 losses. ...

Basically, over the past years, the agency has experienced a net loss of 2 offices per year. The agency will continue to conduct service delivery assessments to look at offices when leases expire. There is no list of offices on the chopping block, but individual office assessments will need to be performed to determine which closures, consolidates, etc. need to be considered. Office closures are very political, which does affect the final outcome. ...

Recently, a new OPM [Office of Personnel Management] guide was published that provides for a significantly lower grade structure for many SSA positions. John Nolan from the Chicago Region is the lead for reviewing the new OPM supervisory guide. All executives have acknowledged the new plan is a problem, although OPM seemed surprised by that concern. A revised draft should be coming out the week of March 10th. NCSSMA past presidents have been tasked with reviewing this. We did not receive a formal response to the five questions raised in our meeting with the Commissioner. We will need to write a formal response and send it to the Commissioner for review.