The Social Security Administration has been working for years to reduce its backlog of disability claims, which now stands at 780,000 claims. It even hired and trained 8,600 new employees last fiscal year.
But any progress it made has come to an abrupt halt. Largely because of the recession, Americans filed 400,000 more disability claims than predicted last year and the agency expects 700,000 more to be filed this year than in 2008.
SSA is not alone. Agencies across government that provide federal assistance are seeing their workloads explode as Americans seek unemployment insurance payments, health care insurance, school lunches, food stamps and college loans. Benefit claims and payouts have jumped in the last year at assistance programs run by the Labor, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services departments, among others.
Dec 1, 2009
Swamped
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3 comments:
SSA's backlog problem isn't being helped by the fact that it is SSA Policy to take SSI (Federal Welfare) claims from every applicant for disability benefit --
even when the claimant is clearly ineligible.
Why?
Stats!
An SSI claim denied (in a few days) for excess income or resources still counts as a processed claim -- and it is averaged into the overall processing time for DIB claims.
It's not only a waste of tax-payer dollars -- it's an invasion of a claimant's privacy -- and it can delay the payment of past due Title II benefits because of the SSI Offset Indicator -- and that's too long a story to tell right now.
The people who take claimsapplications are not qualified to determine whether or not claimants are disabled, so SSA cannot refuse to take applications from anyone.
SSA cannot refuse to take an application, although many CR's make it a practice to do so to avoid work. That is different from coercing someone to file an application that they would not have otherwise filed, because they do not meet NON-medical criteria, which every claims rep is authorized to determine.
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