The Social Security Administration has released its annual grand compendium of data, the Statistical Supplement. The data is a year old but still useful. Below is one table readers may find interesting. Note the declining Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) productivity.
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| Click on table to view full size |
From what I see on the ground at my local ODAR/OHO it seldom seems to be operating at full daily capacity. Back in the the 2008 to 2010 period the waiting room always seemed to be overflowing. Oftentimes nowadays only two or three ALJ's might be in action on any given day. It has much more of a feeling of rationing of benefits sometimes as opposed to lack of resources. Sorry for being conspiratorial but seems like there has been some intentional pain inflicted on the disabled and some financial unpredictability and hardship on those in the rep business. This has also resulted in a few big ships on the rep side going down. Hard to believe there was no intention behind it.
ReplyDeleteYou’re seeing that probably because half the judges are there half the time. Can’t be running at full capacity in those circumstances. Pop over to the ALJ discussion forum and look at the ongoing thread about telework. My guess is telework days weren’t so common 10 years ago.
ReplyDeleteThey’re worried it’s going away because some other agencies are scaling it back. If it did I wonder if the backlogs would start to go down. Everyone thinks they are more productive working from home. Maybe it’s diminishing returns and now the agency is crossing over that line where they need to call everyone back in...
Files are getting, more regulations to follow, more sophisticated reps, higher turnover in dw staff, longer decisions etc. -
ReplyDeletelots of factors to consider.
They have added about 20 duties to the aljs over the years so it is no wonder that they are not as productive.
ReplyDeleteThe difference has occurred with the proliferation of video hearings. On any given day, 20-50% of our hearings have the claimants at other locations. That was not true 10 years ago.
ReplyDeleteWe have no staff. They are the ones who work up and get the cases ready for hearings. No cases ready to hear, no hearings to schedule.
ReplyDeleteCouple of points. the table notes that Attorney Advisor dispositions are excluded. Don't know, but since those have dropped to near zero, the numbers in earlier years must have been higher. Adding them in makes the numbers of dispositions overall show a greater decline.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the drop followed the ill-fated ALJ lawsuit that Judge Posner so rudely dumped. Since that point, not to be conspiratorial either, but the production of Judges has been dropping right along. Strikes as something of a deliberate work slowdown more than anything else.
Lastly, there seems to have been a slight uptick in production lately. Decisions per ALJ per day has gone up from 1.7 to 1.9. It was around 24 in earlier years. I wonder if the Agency requiring 50 hearing scheduled to get homework instead of showing up has anything to do with that.
Another factor is that there have been, what, 600+ new hires since the fall of 2014 through 2016? Each new hire has a 9-month ramp up before they are allowed to hear a full caseload. If you've got a large chunk of your workforce hearing 1/2 to 2/3 of the required cases, your production is going to drop as well. Now that the judges hired from August/September 2014 through 2016 are all hearing full dockets, it will probably help continue the downward trend in the pending caseload in conjunction with the other factors discussed on this blog.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget Huntington, WV - lots of publicity in 2013. After that, a lot fewer judges doing 1000+ per year (for good reason). Probably an appropriate correction, but causes numbers to decrease.
ReplyDeleteMany judges hit 240 hours of annual leave around the 10th year in service. At that point, they have to take four weeks of leave per year. At 15 years they have to take six weeks or lose it.
ReplyDeleteSo you have judges faced with losing a benefit or losing the benefit. They are going to take the benefit.
Add to that, ACA has meant more claimants with medical records beyond a single consultative mental exam and single consultative physical exam.
Toss in an uptick in veterans with impairments who come with voluminous VA medical records that tend to be organized by the shuffle the deck three times rule.
Sprinkle in the agency telling the judges that they have to do more administrative tasks that were previously performed by case technicians and writers
Fewer available hours to work, more hours required to review files properly. Shocking (hahaha) that no at the agency saw this coming and the need to shift tasks away from the judges to keep productivity up.
At least in my region, the file size has been going through the roof the last 3-4 years.
ReplyDeleteI can echo the above statements. Since the Huntington debacle, ALJs are limited to a ceiling of 700 hearings per year. Rightfully so, since there's no way that the judges who were issuing 1000+ decisions per year could have actually reviewed the file and held a comprehensive hearing. Also, more ALJ hires means more judges on a learning curve and doing fewer hearings for the first 9 months to a year. The file size keeps growing in most jurisdictions with the additional coverage provide by the ACA. Also, fewer employees in the office due to budgetary constraints means that ALJs have to do more clerical work. These factors change from office to office, but nonetheless, they account for the downward trend.
ReplyDeleteThe agency is panicking and threatening judges holding less than 50 hearings per month, but this was all foreseeable results of actions/inactions the agency has taken over the last few years.
The statistics in table 6.C7 are interesting in showing a dramatic drops in some categories. In 2010 about 7 out of every 1000 insured workers were awarded Title II benefits. That steadily declined up to 2016, when only 4.9 out of every 1000 insured workers were awarded benefits. In the same time period, the number of applications significantly decreased, and awards as a percentage of applications decreased from 35.7% to 32.1%. While some will dispute what's driving this miserly trend, none can credibly dispute that SSA is braking hard when it comes to awarding benefits.
ReplyDeleteOr they had been way too caviler with awards in the past, using the program as a prop for the dead economy and an unemployment program and are now applying the program properly.
ReplyDeleteNo, 9:17, that's not at all what happened. At the hearing level, clearly Krasfur, Bridges, Daugherty, and the others that were paying 90% or more of their 1000+ dispositions (many of which were on the record) were doing the job correctly. Clearly this is a vast conspiracy by the agency with forced denials at all levels, maximum quotas of favorable cases, etc. Proper training of judges hired in the last decade, proper application of the law, and less "I'll do whatever I want because I'm the judge" decision making cannot be a possibility.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, there are still ALJs out there that don't know what they're doing in the job or are still using their own personal credibility evaluation to make decisions, and yes, this is quite unfair.
As someone who has been in the trenches for a long time, I still find that it varies. There are still plenty of ALJs who do what I consider to be a good job and call it like they see it. I don't always agree with their decisions, but I can't fault that they are putting an honest effort into providing fair hearings and justice for claimants. There has always been a relative minority of ALJs who just don't follow the rules and issue a lot of arbitrary, bad decisions. That minority does a lot of damage to claimants who are legitimately disabled and SSA has very little ability and inclination to stop them. The trend I've noticed is that the number of poor ALJs has grown a bit, and the Appeals Council is now far less likely to remand or reverse their decisions even when they are clearly wrong.
ReplyDelete@10:39, bad economy, claim applications went way up, awards were up, good economy, new filings down awards down. Not alternative facts, just facts.
ReplyDelete