The National Association of Disability Examiners (NADE), an organization of personnel involved in making disability determinations for Social Security, has released its most recent newsletter, focusing on NADE's recent conference in Portland.
NADE members attending the conference heard a presentation on Social Security's effort to create a new occupational information system to replace the outdated Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) used in disability determinations. There are a couple of items of interest from the write-up. The number of occupations listed will go down from the DOT's 12,000 to 1,000, which means that each job title will be even more of a composite. Composite jobs are broader and can only be described in more amorphous ways. Training on the new occupational information system is supposed to begin sometime in 2016.
Pardon me for being so cynical, but every time SSA starts a new program that requires retraining, the lost processing time contributes to an ever-growing backlog. Remember HPI (Hearings Process Initiative)which was magically going to solve all of ODAR's problems? While SSA employees were being trained, no hearings were held in my neck of the woods for about 6 months, and that was the start of the huge backlog which has been approaching 1 million. After all the "retraining," will this project actually work, or will it have to be rescinded as a failure like many other pie-in-the sky projects? Are they now shooting for a backlog of 2 million?
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see how VEs adapt to a new system. As so many of these so called "experts" rely upon Skilltran or the like, it will be intereting to see how they learn to utilize a new system.
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