I had recently wondered about the state of the senior attorney advisor decision program at Social Security. The newsletter of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) (which is not available online) has some numbers on senior attorney advisor decisions:
- FY 2012: 37,423
- FY 2013 18,625
- FY 2014 1,872
11 comments:
Do you even read the comments to your blog?? I've explained the new NSU program in detail multiple times...How is the rep community to slow to hear about this?
Senior attorneys are all "working" at home. They have no time to issue decisions.
1:14 you got that right
@ 114, 217
At least it's more work than 99% of lazy reps do
SAA decisions will increase again shortly, 20 adjudication positions (for SAA) were just advertised internally...the job should start sometime in March.
@ 7:27
errrrnnt, wrong.
what you don't know is that starting very soon only those 20 SAAs will be able to issue OTRs for the foreseeable future.
@ 9:15...you're right, but if 20 SAA can't do more than 1800 decisions in a year (90 each) then there are serious problems with the system
@ 11:22
You're absolutely correct. I was more thinking about the previous water mark(s) for SAA OTRs, but yes, absolutely they will produce far more than last year. Doing a best case scenario number crunch (not off duty a lot, averaging 1.5-2.0 decisions a day, etc.) doesn't get the total much higher than 10k, though :(
@ 7:23 AM--"explaining" it over and over again will not explain it, it makes no sense. We all know that there are viable OTRs that are just clogging up the system. Their numbers did not change drastically, only their treatment.
It's not that SAAs don't want to write OTRs. It's that they're not allowed anymore. The closure of the VSU and its replacement with the NSU was heralded by the imposition of ridiculously stringent standards which made payments near impossible. Now the NSU itself is closing and will be replaced by, as 9/26/15 9:28 AM says, a corps of 20 SAAs who have a little more freedom in what they can pay... but they will be the onl 20 SAAs in America who will have signatory authority, going forward. All the rest of the SAAs will be out in the cold, so to speak.
I've mentioned the cause before, too. But here it is again for those that missed it the first time.
We were told that the head actuary got wind of a significant and quick drop in agree rate for SAA OTRs. Though this drop was largely the result of new/different evaluation standard (i.e., the decisions were the same but the review standard changed such that more cases failed review--I'm not weighing in on the objective quality here), that wasn't a particularly moving argument. Keeping in mind W.Va. was still fresh and Mr. head actuary is very concerned about spending, the idea that a bunch of incorrect FF decisions going out the door was troubling.
There was talk of scrapping SAA adjudication altogether, but SSA was able to salvage the program by agreeing to tightly bind adjudicators. Hence the NSU and its Meets/Equals/Straight grid requirements and the (unstated) quota of OTRs per year.
When the NSU system failed to appreciably raise the SAA OTR agree rate, SSA had to further tighten things. Hence no adjudication for any SAAs save for the 20-person cadre that is being formed.
So there you go. The enigma is unwrapped.
Post a Comment