The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a federal grand jury is investigating whether former Social Security Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) David Daughtry received improper payments in exchange for awarding disability benefits. According to the report, Social Security's Inspector General is looking into a "series" of ALJs who award benefits in a high number of cases.
Daughtry awarded benefits to virtually every claimant whose case he heard. Certainly, this would have included the cases of at least several attorneys and a fair number of unrepresented claimants. I don't recommend any sort of bribery but why would someone even be tempted to bribe an ALJ to approve a disability claim if the ALJ would approve the claim even without being bribed? Why use a sledgehammer to break down a door that is not only unlocked but which is standing wide open? Of course, these is a suggestion that there was some funny business about the assignment of cases to ALJs in that office and there could be impropriety there. Still, count me as skeptical that they will ever come up with evidence of any serious criminal offense here. Social Security has a long list of problems but corruption is very, very low on that list.
Daughtry awarded benefits to virtually every claimant whose case he heard. Certainly, this would have included the cases of at least several attorneys and a fair number of unrepresented claimants. I don't recommend any sort of bribery but why would someone even be tempted to bribe an ALJ to approve a disability claim if the ALJ would approve the claim even without being bribed? Why use a sledgehammer to break down a door that is not only unlocked but which is standing wide open? Of course, these is a suggestion that there was some funny business about the assignment of cases to ALJs in that office and there could be impropriety there. Still, count me as skeptical that they will ever come up with evidence of any serious criminal offense here. Social Security has a long list of problems but corruption is very, very low on that list.
One interesting aspect of the report is that the Wall Street Journal has used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain a list of total fees paid in 2010 to attorneys who represent Social Security claimants. One attorney that ALJ Daughtry dealt with, Eric Conn, ranked third in the nation on this list with fees of $3.8 million. Presumably, the Wall Street Journal will release more of this list in the future.
I suspect that manipulating case assignments takes place in many offices. In my region, one ALJ seems to get all of the mental health impairment cases, and denies every one. This ALJ has replaced the prior ALJ that also seemed to get assigned to every mental health case, and who also denied every one. A new ALJ has been seemingly assigned to every children's case, as if it's a rite of passage to handle children's cases. So for a variety of reasons, not necessarily done to reward any one attorney, I do believe that the case assignments are not purely random.
ReplyDeleteCase assignments are most certainly not random. I had a chat once with a case tech in my local ODAR who told me that every single remaining paper case (i.e. not electronic) in the office was assigned to one very, very old ALJ who is not good with computers. Maybe that's not indicative of every case, including the vastly larger numbers of electronic vs non-electronic cases, but I think it shows that that kind of thing happens.
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