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Jun 13, 2008

Hearing Backlog Growing

I have received a report from a well placed source that the backlog of cases at Social Security awaiting a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) is currently a whopping 769,000 and increasing at the rate of about 10,000 per month. Currently, 59% of these cases have not been worked up for review by an ALJ.

The math is pretty simple. On average, each Social Security ALJs is currently disposing of about 50 cases per month. 10,000 divided by 50 is 200. This means that just to prevent the backlog from growing, Social Security would need an additional 200 ALJs. To reduce the backlog would take more than 200 ALJs. Social Security's plans do not call for increasing the number of its ALJs by anything like 200. Therefore, Social Security has no current plan for preventing the backlog from growing, much less a plan for reducing it.

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