New Social Security Ruling And It's Something Else

     From Social Security Ruling 17-4p to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow:

... We expect individuals to exercise their reasonable good faith judgment about what evidence “relates” to their disability claims. Evidence that may relate to whether or not a claimant is blind or disabled includes objective medical evidence, medical opinion evidence, other medical evidence, and evidence from nonmedical sources. ...

[W]e expect representatives to submit or inform us about written evidence as soon as they obtain or become aware of it. Representatives should not wait until 5 business days before the hearing to submit or inform us about written evidence unless they have compelling reasons for the delay (e.g., it was impractical to submit the evidence earlier because it was difficult to obtain or the representative was not aware of the evidence at an earlier date). In addition, it is only acceptable for a representative to inform us about evidence without submitting it if the representative shows that, despite good faith efforts, he or she could not obtain the evidence. Simply informing us of the existence of evidence without providing it or waiting until 5 days before a hearing to inform us about or provide evidence when it was otherwise available, may cause unreasonable delay to the processing of the claim, without good cause, and may be prejudicial to the fair and orderly conduct of our administrative proceedings. As such, this behavior could be found to violate our rules of conduct and could lead to sanction proceedings against the representative. ...

We will evaluate each circumstance on a case-by-case basis to determine whether to refer a possible violation of our rules to our Office of the General Counsel (OGC) . For example, in accordance with the regulatory interpretation discussed above, we may refer a possible violation of rules to OGC when:

• a representative informs us about written evidence but refuses, without good cause, to make good faith efforts to obtain and timely submit the evidence;

• a representative informs us about evidence that relates to a claim instead of acting with reasonable promptness to help obtain and timely submit the evidence to us;

• the representative waits until 5 days before a hearing to provide or inform us of evidence when the evidence was known to the representative or available to provide to us at an earlier date;

• the clients of a particular representative have a pattern of informing us about written evidence instead of making good-faith efforts to obtain and timely submit the evidence; or

• any other occasion when a representative’s actions with regard to the submission of evidence may violate our rules for representative. ...

     I do not know if there is any practical way to notify the Social Security Administration immediately of the existence of new medical evidence. Am I supposed to send Social Security a notice about each visit my client has with a physician? Am I required to separately obtain a report on each physician visit? This appears to impose a duty upon an attorney to obtain every piece of medical evidence concerning a client -- including the hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of records generated by each hospitalization. The Ruling says we can't just inform Social Security of the existence of evidence. We have to obtain it and there is no limit upon this duty. How reasonable is this?

     I know there's some people that Social Security wants to put out of business. They probably deserve to be put out of business but this is over the top. No one will be able to strictly comply with this. No one.