The Social Security Administration has finally decided to kill off the e-pulling experiment. Before being heard by Social Security's Administrative Law Judges (ALJs), the files of disability claimants are normally put into some semblance of order by staff at hearing offices. This "pulling" of exhibits can be a time consuming business. Lisa DeSoto, the former head of Social Security's Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR), thought that a computer program could do this. A lot of people, including me, kept saying that e-pulling would never work. We were right. Too much judgment is involved in pulling exhibits to allow a computer program to perform this vital task. I wonder how much money was wasted.
I also wonder how much this fiasco cost. But, maybe it's not so much when you consider that *all* the projects to fix DIB back to the 1980's cost more and have done little or nothing to improve the process. It's a right smart of money spent on software and process that could have been better spent on personnel.
ReplyDelete