Jul 30, 2011

An Outlier

We have had recent talk of "outliers" at Social Security, Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) who approve or deny too many or too few claims or who just dispose of too many or too few cases, but in one way perhaps the most prominent outlier of all of Social Security's ALJs is Richard Harper, the Hearing Office Chief Administrative Law Judge (HOCALJ) in Charlotte. He is holding down this position even though he is 90 years of age.
He was  Administrative Law Judge In Charge (ALJIC), the old title for what is now HOCALJ, in 1978 when I interviewed for a job as a staff attorney. I took a job in Raleigh, where I was living, instead. He's still there.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Judicial discretion and the powers vested in them via the law of the land. How can you fight outliers? It's called the AC. I don't think that SSA can do a whole lot, administratively, about these outliers, in fact, I hope SSA cannot do much. Every profession has outliers; it's part of life. We know they are their, but the final check/balance is in the multistep appeals process.

Anonymous said...

Sorry about the mispelling above.

Anonymous said...

yes the A/C should theoretically be the buffer that eliminates many problems we have today. if they actually did their job and quit rubberstamping bad decisions, this would clean up a whole lot of messes at the ODAR level (unjustified denials and approvals, "outliers," etc) and the federal court level (cleaning up bad FIT language, bad reasoning, etc).

Anonymous said...

Um, are you advocating age discrimination? If there is an objective basis for letting him go, then what is it?

Anonymous said...

i sometimes get the idea that mr hall has no friggin idea what he is saying or why he is saying it

Anonymous said...

Thank you, anon 7:21. I read this entry several times and kept thinking I was missing something. Is there an allegation that he is unable to perform his job? Or am I just supposed to infer that of course he must be incompetent because is is 90 years old?

Anonymous said...

Attempting to look at the post in the kindest manner possible, maybe Mr. Hall is simply commenting on the oddity of a 90-year-old still working for the federal government.