ALJ Association Rebuttal

From a statement filed with the House Social Security Subcommittee by the Association of Administrative Law Judges (AALJ), a union which represents many Social Security ALJs (emphasis in original):

For the April 23 2008 hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee on Clearing the Disability Backlog, Commissioner of Social Security Michael J. Astrue submitted a written statement and testified. The Association of Administrative Law Judges (AALJ) believes significant portions of the Commissioner’s statements were incorrect, misleading or irrelevant to the backlog issue. This statement is submitted in rebuttal. ...

It is critical to understand that currently, of the 758,000 total pending cases, 446,000 of them, 59% of the total backlog, are waiting in the hearing offices to be worked up for a judge to review. This is the precise location of the blockage causing the backlog. ...

The Commissioner’s statement that since he took office in early 2007 he has increased the number of support staff from 4.1 to 4.4 is a surprising statement. Of course any attrition in the number of judges would increase the ratio of staff to judge. To increase the ratio to 4.4 would require a net addition of about 300 staff, or approximately 2 per hearing office. It is quite possible that staff personnel have been added in administrative offices, not working on programs, but such personnel cannot legitimately be considered to be staff supporting the work of the judges. This statement needs clarification and supporting data. ...

Smoke and Mirrors
Many of SSA’s highly publicized “Initiatives to Reduce the Backlog” in fact can have little if any effect on actually reducing the backlog. A few examples:

• The National Hearing Center took five judges from several offices and put them together in a new office in Falls Church. Moving five judges does nothing to reduce the backlog.
• As explained above, hiring 175 new judges without adding adequate staff is a hollow gesture. It is equivalent to purchasing 175 new trucks and fuel for 20.
• SSA has expended approximately 50,000 hours of overtime to aid ODAR in getting its work done. The faults are that the money was spent on non-ODAR personnel who do not know the ODAR work and the overtime was viewed as a benefit and thus rotated among field office personnel. The personnel who learned the job this week were replaced the following week by new personnel who did not know the job. With time lost for on-the-job training plus overtime premium, the cost to SSA has been excessive and the production sub-standard.
• Even the initiative to clear out all cases more than 1,000 days old, while commendable, did not reduce the backlog. Dozens of pages in releases and reports have been devoted to hailing this as reducing the backlog when in fact it merely shifted the production effort from one group of claims to another.

SSA’s Public Relations machine is endeavoring to convince Congress and the public that it is reducing the backlog but a review of the initiatives discloses that, while they may give the appearance of reducing the backlog, in fact they do not. ...

(This is not available elsewhere online at this point to the best of my knowledge)