Scheiber Statement To Ways And Means: 43% Of Re-Recons Approved

An excerpt from a much longer statement by Sylvester Schieber, Chairman of the Social Security Advisory Board, to the House Ways and Means Committee:

One of the initiatives in the Commissioner’s Plan to Eliminate the Hearings Backlog is the informal remand process. Cases that were denied by the DDS and are waiting for a hearing at the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) are being screened and where appropriate returned to the DDS for another look. The program has been in place for about a year now and the cases that are sent back have been purposely selected because they are the most likely to be proper allowances. Nonetheless, out of the 34,000 cases informally remanded so far, the DDSs have allowed 43 percent and well over two-thirds of those were allowed without any additional development.