From The NOSSCR Conference -- David Foster

David Foster, Social Security's Deputy Commissioner for the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, spoke today at the NOSSCR Conference. I will try to summarize what I got from his talk, but I must tell you that I had some difficulty understanding him. I found his speech pattern a bit disjointed. In a smaller forum where I could have seen his facial expressions there might have been little problem, but this was in a room with about 1,000 people. I hope I understood this correctly:

• Foster had on a suit, but spoke in his shirtsleeves.
• There was to have been a Senate Finance Committee hearing next Tuesday at which he would have spoken, but this has been postponed.
• Social Security has seen a recent spike in disability claims filed.
• He believes that Social Security turned the corner on the disability hearings backlog last month.
• Informal remands (also known as re-recon) may end soon due to backlogs at the Disability Determination Services (DDS) offices.
• Social Security hopes to adopt regulations recognizing entities as representatives of claimants by next February. Attorney and representative internet access to claimant electronic records is on hold pending these regulations. [See my next post for what Nancy Shor had to say on this subject. See below in this post for signs of bandwidth issues. that mighgt also delay this] He wants to include electronic access to earnings records to the e-file access.
• Social Security's Vocational Experts have recently received a 10% increase in the fees they are paid for testifying.
• A raise for Medical Expert witnesses testifying at ODAR is being complicated by possible effects upon the DDSs.
• E-scheduling is about a year from proof of concept and at least two years from implementation. Foster seemed dubious about the concept. [I heard from some other attorneys about some experiment along these lines going on now, which confuses me. They did not seem to understand what was going on either.]
• Robbie Watts (name?) was recently hired to help with coordination between ODAR and the DDSs. Watts, if I understood the name correctly, had been the director of the Natonal Council of DDS Directors.
• He took a question concerning a controversy about how a claimant's attorney could help a claimant file a claim electronically. The problem is that Social Security is insisting that the claimant literally push the "send" button to do this. Foster seemed to be blaming the advocacy community for opposition to legislation on this subject. [I did not understand where he was coming from, but then I do not understand why Social Security seems to be persisting in obstructing electronic filing of claims for this reason, at the same time they are encouraging electronic filing of claims.]
  
• ODAR is looking at centralized burning of CDs of claimant files for attorneys and representatives. He said that doing this locally was eating up too much bandwidth. [If this is eating up too much bandwidth, how can Social Security be seriously contemplating giving attorneys and representatives access to their clients' records online? That would eat up far more bandwidth.]