Republicans Want Investigation But ALJs Approwing Fewer Claims

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Rejected for federal disability benefits, unemployed workers who appealed to Judge David B. Daugherty in West Virginia last year had a change of luck: He approved every request he saw.

That record has spurred Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., ranking members of the Senate Finance Committee, to seek an investigation into whether unemployed Americans are cheating the system.

Lenient administrative judges may be viewing Social Security Disability Insurance payments “as an extension of unemployment benefits, rather than as a program to assist the truly disabled,” they told Social Security Inspector General Patrick O’Carroll Jr.

Allowing the unemployed to “exploit SSDI,” they wrote, would pass “enormous and crippling costs to taxpayers.” ...

[C]ontrary to the concerns raised by Hatch and Coburn, Social Security’s 1,500 administrative judges are approving fewer payments — the overall “allowance rates” are declining, [a Social Security spokesman] said.

Nationwide, judges approved 67 percent of cases they heard in fiscal 2010, according to a Salt Lake Tribune analysis of data posted on the Social Security website. So far in fiscal 2011, it has reached 64 percent.