From The News Journal of Delaware:
If a serious ailment keeps you from working, your claim for Social Security disability benefits should be handled the same way everywhere, whether it’s decided by an administrative law judge in Dover, Denver or Des Moines. But those who live in Delaware will face tougher judges.
Through a Freedom of Information request, The News Journal examined four years of Social Security disability claim data and found some startling inequities.Read the full story in the Sunday News Journal and at delawareonline.com. You can browse our database of denial rates now.
The database compares hearing offices, not individual Administrative Law Judges. The Dover, Delaware hearing office has one of the lowest allowance rates in the country.
Update: A reader correctly points out that if one clicks on the location of a hearing office in the database, a list of ALJs assigned to that office comes up, showing the rate at which each denies claims.
Update: A reader correctly points out that if one clicks on the location of a hearing office in the database, a list of ALJs assigned to that office comes up, showing the rate at which each denies claims.
Mr. Hall's current message, which may change, is this:
ReplyDelete"The database compares hearing offices, not individual Administrative Law Judges. The Dover, Delaware hearing office has one of the lowest allowance rates in the country."
That's incorrect. The database in question includes charts both by hearing office and by ALJ.
The ALJ chart is organized by hearing office. This makes it easy to look at the denial rates for all four ALJs in Dover.
I'm not well enough grounded in probability theory to say whether there's anything mathmatically unusal about the pattern you will see, three vs. one, for the Dover ALJ denial rates. But I invite you to compare it with the individual rates for the Norfolk hearing office, not so very far away. Although the overall average is close for Dover v. Norfolk, the internal spread is much wider for Norfolk's seven ALJs.
Why compare with Norfolk? Because that's what the Office of the Inspector General did with OIG did a report on the number of complaints about ALJs in the Dover HO.