Sep 23, 2010

Problems At The Appeals Council

An e-mail I received from a legal assistant at my firm:

No surprise, but just received this from Barbara Hunt, Chief, Congressional and Public Affairs Branch [at the Appeals Council]:

“The Council has received an unprecedented number of requests for review and as a result, is experiencing lengthy delays in the processing of its cases. Although the average processing time for the Council is about 13 months, it is not unusual to find delays of about 30 months”

I have found that they are only answering the phones in the morning. The afternoon calls go to a “general mailbox” which, from my experience, is equivalent to a black hole. I have yet to get a call back from messages left there.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The appeals council process should be eliminated. It seems useless. And the government would see great savings if it was discontinued.

Nancy Ortiz said...

I agree with A#1. Just another backlog within a backlog. A legitimate function might be conducting a sample review of decisions. I would be helpful to hear from someone who works at the AC about their function and process. I imagine we won't though. I never succeeded in getting a call answered there. So, I have no experience of their actual value to the process. Nancy Ortiz

Anonymous said...

I have seen quite a few cases in the last 2-3 years that were remanded by Appeals Council back to ALJ's for "reconsideration" so to speak of the decision, and also prior denials that finally found their way to an award after many years--resulting in start date records, manual comps, etc. Appeals Council remands in past few years have actually resulted in a significant increase in the numbers of claims awarded following ALJ denials. I have no stats--just personal experience in the FO.

Anonymous said...

At ALJ refresher training last month, an AAJ told us that he is responsible for 5000 cases a year. He actually reviews only a small percentage of those and must rely on analysts, many of whom are new and only 40 percent of whom he believed were competent. Sure restored my faith in the AC

Anonymous said...

Receipts at the AC for requests for review this just-completed fiscal year were 124k. Clearances were 94k. The pending is now 106k. About 5 or 6 years back, the pending bottomed out around 42k. Pending has been climbing since then, quite dramatically this last fiscal year.

Staffing didn't keep up with receipts through 2008. Hiring was a relative trickle. In calendar 2009, the hiring faucet got turned wide open, although not so very much for clerical support staff. Counting those who start training class this coming Monday, since 5/09 the Office of Appellate Operations hired a total of 300 new analysts, 250 of whom are attorneys. That's about a doubling of staff. The Council itself has about doubled in size over the past couple of years. Counting Appeals Officers and Administrative Appeals Judges together, the AC is now over a 100 strong.

When I came on board as staff in the 1980's, there were 15 AC members and about 300-350 analysts. Depending on how you count heads, this second number fell to around 175 in the mid-1990's, when 50 analysts were tasked to writing hearing decisions. With Monday's new group, the headcount is about 560.

The learning curve for new analysts is, I venture to guess, something not too dissimilar to new CRs. I attempt no other comparison. But there is surely there is this basic rule for jobs that are complex: new people hurt you before they help you. 300 inexperienced people need a lot of technical care and feeding.

The 5000 case/year comment is hard to make sense of. If there were only 50 AAJs (there are slightly more), then 5000/year would translate into 250,000 cases—and as I've said, dispositions for this past year were only 94,000. Plus, the AOs (somewhat less than 50) carry a significant part of the workload.

This is not to say that the workload for the individual AAJ is any less than crushing. No, it's not. The crushing workload makes the AAJ vulnerable to mistakes by his or her analysts—over half of whom have quite limited experience.

All of this information was at the NOSSCR conference, presented on Wednesday complete with charts.

The 40% remark above might have been about all the newbies, although I suspect it's probably aimed at the nonattorney analysts. Every large job-specific group includes those who can't or won't perform well. Would you be surprised if I claimed that this included ALJs?

I claim extensive experience dealing with work product from both groups, analysts and ALJs alike. I offer no percentage estimate of incompetency for either group.

BTW, this is the first Saturday since March when the office has been open without my being there. I mention this as a way of saying that I'm posting this from home. I won't say I'm in my private capacity: we've got two, but we keep the desktop and keyboard in one of the larger rooms. I will say that I do not mean to imply that SSA approves of anything I say here. Please don't infer any such approval.

JOA

Anonymous said...

I've thought of a solution for the 5k/year puzzle. It's a localized and not global answer. In fact, it's so localized an answer that I think I could give a ranked list of 4 or 5 names about who made the 5k a year comment to the anonymous ALJ who posted here about it.

The Office of Appellate Operations (OAO) doesn't have mods. It has branches. The typical organization for a branch is that there's one Administrative Appeals Judge (AAJ) and one Appeals Officer (AO). It's the AAJ and the AO who make the final call. They do this on cases for which analysts make recommendations. The workload pushes the AAJ and AO hard.. And they are vulnerable to errors made by their staff of analysts.

(I will qualify here that AAJs and AOs are NOT SHY about rejecting recommendations.)

OAO is spread over three locations. (Monday there will be a fourth.) I'll call these Falls Church, Baltimore 1 and Baltimore 2. Typical staffing for a Falls Church Branch is something like 10-12 analysts. I believe the Baltimore 2 branches run a tad larger. But in Baltimore 2, there are 150 analysts divided into only 5 branches of 28-32 analysts. So far as I know—please take this qualification seriously for all of what I say here—for production purposes there's just the same one AAJ and one AO for the Baltimore 2 branches.

This leaves those poor Baltimore 2 AAJs and AOs with something like 200-250% of the normal workload. Plus, Baltimore 2 is with minor exceptions entirely staffed by analysts hired between May and October 2009. Newbies.

Now, at Baltimore 2 there are reputations about who does a ton of work, mostly all of them, actually, and also reputations about who does a ton and a half of work. So when I pile this last speculation on top of the other information, I'm thinking that I might actually be able to name who made that 5k comment to the anonymous ALJ who posted it here. I rather expect that the AAJ who said it would be surprised to see it repeated on the web. I doubt that he or she would be surprised at the implicit contempt for the Appeals Council. That's been around, often in spades, for 30 years.

I could be wrong about this. I could be way wrong about this. But if I'm not, then the lesson is a familiar one: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

This extends to quite a number of the things Mr. Hall blogs about. Including the particular blog post here. But I think I'm done for today.

JOA