The Appeals Council Is A Mess

    From a recent report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) (emphasis added):

In FY [Fiscal Year] 2013, AC [Appeals Counsel] request for review dispositions exceeded FY 2007 dispositions by about 102 percent. However, receipts were greater than dispositions during the same period, resulting in a tripling of pending cases from about 53,000 to about 157,000 cases by the end of FY 2013. The increase in pending claims resulted in longer average processing times (APT) at the end of FY 2013, with claimants waiting about 364 days for an AC action , up from 227 days in FY 2007.

While SSA had an APT goal for AC workloads in prior years, SSA ended its annual reporting on APT in FY 2012. During this same period, t he AC focused its efforts on processing the oldest cases in the backlog under the Agency's Aged Case initiative and made progress in reducing the average age of its pending claims. Moreover, the growth in the number of dispositions over this 7-year period follows the addition of adjudicators and staff as well as efforts to increase the productivity of analysts and staff supporting adjudicators. While OAO [Office of Appeals Operations] established numerical productivity goals for analysts, it did not establish similar productivity goals for AC adjudicators, although it did have timeliness goals for its adjudicators. In FY 2012, AAJ [Administrative Appeals Judges] annual dispositions ranged from 780 to 3,471 cases. We found a similar range with AO [Appeals Officer] adjudicators. The lack of productivity goals and cap s for AAJs or AOs, particularly given the wide range in the number of dispositions each AAJ and AO issued, increases the risk that OAO may miss opportunities to increase production as well as identify potential quality issues. Finally, while OAO executives had created internal, division-level productivity goals for every DPA division and communicated those goals with OAO manager, some managers and staff were confused as to how those internal goals were determined. ...

In SSA’s FY 2013 APP, SSA explained that it eliminated the APT goal because “We have successfully reduced Appeals Council average processing time over the last few years and want to now focus on eliminating Appeals Council cases pending 365 days or over.”  However, as shown in Table 1, APT had increased over the last few years. ...

[W]e found the number of dispositions per adjudicator dropped in FY 2009 before rising annually through FY 2012. However, by the end of FY 2012, adjudicator productivity had not reached the FY 2008 disposition level ...