The United Kingdom has disability benefits as part of its social security system. There are many, many differences between their disability benefits and those in the United States but one way that they are similar is that claimants may have hearings on their cases, before Administrative Law Judges in the United States and before tribunals in the U.K. Those hearings are somewhat different in that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) may be represented at the hearing by a "presenting officer." That's a concept that's been proposed in the past in the U.S. Here's some excerpts from a recent article about the presenting officers in the U.K.:
DWP has finally released information that shows that the presenting officers (POs) it sends to personal independence payment (PIP) appeals must report back to their bosses afterwards on whether they persuaded the tribunal not to grant an enhanced PIP award.
The same applies for those sent to employment and support allowance (ESA) appeals, with POs having to tell their managers whether they persuaded the tribunal not to award the claimant eligibility for the ESA support group. ...
Marsha de Cordova, Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, yesterday (Wednesday) described DWP’s admission as “truly appalling”. ...
[The author of this piece] has been in contact with a DWP civil servant working on the PIP “frontline” – who is also a former PIP case manager – who has warned that POs are being given the “target” of stopping enhanced PIP payments. ...
The minister for disabled people, Sarah Newton, said last November that DWP was “recruiting, training and deploying” about 150 POs to attend PIP and ESA tribunals “in order to present the Secretary of State’s case and support the First tier Tribunal in arriving at the right decision”. ...
“A PO is not there to prevent an award being changed, but to ensure that the award is correct. ..." ...
3 comments:
If US SSD hearings become adversarial, then ALJs will become unconstitutional under our present Federalist Society-junta judiciary. Forget that.
SSA is more likely to get rid of ALJs and allow direct appeal of recons to the DC than to create an adversarial process.
SSA experimented twice with eliminating the AC: once by pilot regulation about 15-20 years ago (allowing direct appeal from ALJ to SC), and then by replacing the AC with the (Favorable) Decision Review Board under COSS Barnhart. Neither one worked. The DCs don't want to be flooded with SSD appeals. The creation of an Article I US SSD court has been think-tanked for a while, as that would allow for an adversarial process.
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