The Orange County Register article on Social Security's hearing backlog included a number of very interesting visuals. Here's one.
5 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I wonder how they got that stat. Lots of states have multiple hearing offices, and many hearing offices pull claimants from many states.
There is a ton of variation though, and some of it is from people who live near each other. 513 days in Little Rock and 352 in Fort Smith. 705 days in Tampa and 582 in St. Pete. 540 days at New York Varick and 755 at New York: these hearing offices are 1.3 miles apart.
It's not just in regions, it's even hearing offices in the same state that have huge variances in hearing time wait. In my practice area, I have hearing offices with around a 12 month wait while others are 20-24 months. Doesn't make any sense.
SSA publishes this data on a monthly basis, but a picture is worth a 1000 words or maybe 10,000 numbers. I don't think representing hearing offices on a state by state level is appropriate as a previous commenter noted. These are not DDSs. SSA could always calculate wait times by individual by where they live and aggregate by state, but I seriously doubt the OC Register got them to do that.
They publish "average processing time", which is from filing appeal to closure, and "Average Wait Time Until Hearing Held" which is hearing request date (appeal filing date?) to the holding of a hearing (excluding whatever time it takes after the hearing is concluded to close the case).
Average processing time: https://www.ssa.gov/appeals/DataSets/05_Average_Processing_Time_Report.html
Average Wait Time Until Hearing Held Report: https://www.ssa.gov/appeals/DataSets/01_NetStat_Report.html
(to get previous reports click on archived data on the left side of the page)
If you want office by office by office wait times see https://www.ssa.gov/appeals/DataSets/01_NetStat_Report.html
What's disturbing is that the SSA lists the National Hearing Center (Chicago) wait time as 24 months according to SSA. Thus if you fail to promptly object to video hearing on a claim that will likely go there you are in no way speeding up the disposition of your claim. In fact you are likely slowing it down considerably depending on where you are, if SSA's own statistics are correct.
5 comments:
I wonder how they got that stat. Lots of states have multiple hearing offices, and many hearing offices pull claimants from many states.
There is a ton of variation though, and some of it is from people who live near each other.
513 days in Little Rock and 352 in Fort Smith.
705 days in Tampa and 582 in St. Pete.
540 days at New York Varick and 755 at New York: these hearing offices are 1.3 miles apart.
It's not just in regions, it's even hearing offices in the same state that have huge variances in hearing time wait. In my practice area, I have hearing offices with around a 12 month wait while others are 20-24 months. Doesn't make any sense.
I feel like this map is not that accurate or is out of date. Many of the states currently have much higher wait times.
SSA publishes this data on a monthly basis, but a picture is worth a 1000 words or maybe 10,000 numbers. I don't think representing hearing offices on a state by state level is appropriate as a previous commenter noted. These are not DDSs. SSA could always calculate wait times by individual by where they live and aggregate by state, but I seriously doubt the OC Register got them to do that.
They publish "average processing time", which is from filing appeal to closure, and "Average Wait Time Until Hearing Held" which is hearing request date (appeal filing date?) to the holding of a hearing (excluding whatever time it takes after the hearing is concluded to close the case).
Average processing time: https://www.ssa.gov/appeals/DataSets/05_Average_Processing_Time_Report.html
Average Wait Time Until Hearing Held Report:
https://www.ssa.gov/appeals/DataSets/01_NetStat_Report.html
(to get previous reports click on archived data on the left side of the page)
If you want office by office by office wait times see https://www.ssa.gov/appeals/DataSets/01_NetStat_Report.html
What's disturbing is that the SSA lists the National Hearing Center (Chicago) wait time as 24 months according to SSA. Thus if you fail to promptly object to video hearing on a claim that will likely go there you are in no way speeding up the disposition of your claim. In fact you are likely slowing it down considerably depending on where you are, if SSA's own statistics are correct.
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