Social Security News: Blame The ALJs

Sep 5, 2008

Blame The ALJs

Public Radio's Marketplace program ran a piece yesterday on Social Security's backlogs. Commissioner Astrue was interviewed. Listen to the piece online. Here are the parts of the transcript of the piece with Astrue's comments:

Judge Robert Habermann hears disability cases in Roanoke, Va., and is an officer in the judge's union. He says the Social Security Administration is pressuring judges to just ram through positive decisions.

ROBERT HABERMANN: It solves a lot of problems by just paying the case. The individual claimant is out of the system. In other words, there are no appeals.

Haberman says those positive decisions could stack up to billions of dollars in wasted taxpayer money.

MICHAEL ASTRUE: Well I've heard that as a union line, but that's just not true. ...

MICHAEL ASTRUE: We've had judges who decided no cases in a year. And we've had judges that have fairly chronically decided double digits -- 40 cases a year.

In fairness, the transcript makes it clear that Astrue also told the reporter that Social Security needed more money to hire more Administrative Law Judges (ALJs), but it appears that Astrue gave about equal weight to more money and ALJ productivity.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...: but it appears that Astrue gave about equal weight to more money and ALJ productivity.

Well that's pretty much the truth. More money might help, but the slacker ALJs need to start pulling their weight. The OIG report said tht was the case.; 11:23 PM, September 05, 2008
Anonymous said...: It would help if ODAR had a mere handful of managers with MBAs or MPAs ANYWHERE, they don't. It would help if they had a management theory to follow - they don't - rank amateurs. It would help if they had sufficient staff, they don't. It would help if the top paid aljs led by example; most of them are less productive than the lowest producing field judge.; 8:25 AM, September 06, 2008
Anonymous said...: This needs to be addressed before more people are hired

ADMINISTRATIVE LAW JUDGES' CASELOAD PERFORMANCE

http://www.ssa.gov/oig/ADOBEPDF/audittxt/A-07-07-17072.htm

While ODAR has taken actions to counsel some ALJs on the timeliness of their case processing, it does not have a formal performance accountability process in place to hold ALJs accountable for performance that is below an acceptable level.

We believe it is important to note that Hearing Office Chief ALJs (HOCALJ) were included in the partially available ALJ classification for the purposes of our review. HOCALJs were excluded from our analysis of fully available ALJs because, although they are full-time employees, they are given the latitude to spend 25 to 50 percent of their time on management functions, depending on the size of the hearing office. However, we found it interesting that, in FY 2006, HOCALJs processed an average of 657 cases. This average was higher than the average of 485 cases processed by fully available ALJs in FY 2006, although HOCALJs are only partially available to adjudicate cases.

In FY 2006, fully available ALJs processed varying numbers of cases (see Table 2). In fact, ALJs processed cases ranging from a LOW OF 40 to a high of 1,805. The average and median number of cases processed by fully available ALJs in FY 2006 were 485 and 476, respectively. ODAR informed us that there is currently no official minimum number of cases an ALJ is required to process.

In FY 2006, 260 of the 895 fully available ALJs processed fewer than 400 cases each. These ALJs represented about 29 percent of ODAR's fully available ALJs. If these ALJs increased their annual production to 400 cases each and the remaining fully available ALJs' production remained constant, the total production by fully available ALJs would have increased by 26,241 cases...; 9:38 AM, September 07, 2008
Anonymous said...: You cannot address poor-performers unless and until enough people are on staff to get the work done. This is brutally true at the field-office level--poor performers hang on and on because there is no one to pick up the slack if they are terminated.; 11:25 AM, September 07, 2008
Anonymous said...: SSA needs to get rid of slackers at all levels. There are a handful of people I work with that would be out the door if was up to me.; 4:35 PM, September 07, 2008