May 2, 2018

Why Does This Vary So Greatly?

From a data file released by Social Security
Posted by Charles T. Hall at
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11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Short answer: lots of factors. Less short answer: the amount of support staff working on the file before and after the hearing, the number of no-show dismissals and withdrawals relative to hearings held, the size of the case files and the ease of access to providers, whether there are local trends that complicate the case review (DAA/opioid abuse hot spots), number of postponements (bad weather, unrepresented claimants, representatives not being prepared, etc.), how well the DDS in that particular region works up the case prior to appeal, the availability of medical experts and whether a particular office encourages or discourages their use to augment file review, the number of hearings held by VTC, the number of claimants relative to the number of judges, etc., etc., etc.

For Ponce, I can think of several reasons their dispositions are so high, not least of which is the lower threshold for disability for non-English speaking claimants. San Bernardino and Moreno Valley are close together, so there must be something about the Inland Empire that makes their cases easier to adjudicate. Past the top 3 offices, there's not a whole lot of variability until you reach the bottom quarter. For the lowest-producing offices, it might be that there are just not that many applicants per the number of judges in that office. Santa Barbara, San Jose, Seattle, and Pasadena are fairly affluent areas with good job growth and a skilled work force, for the most part. There are a lot of variables, but surely a good job market means lower receipts for that office and consequently fewer dispositions per judge.

11:28 AM, May 02, 2018
Anonymous said...

This list doesn't distinguish offices that are receiving assistance from an NHC, such as: Tulsa, Syracuse, Huntington, Topeka.

2:32 PM, May 02, 2018
Anonymous said...

Just skimming, I see a couple offices toward the bottom that I know have had some judges transfer out. Those goof up processing time because you have to send decisions to the new office for signing and send back. Unless the process has improved it used to difficult to sign cases for your old office. Then you have the lag until a new judge arrives and often the new judge is literally a new judge and working a lower caseload for several months.

4:53 PM, May 02, 2018
Anonymous said...

Feel like it's the atmosphere of the OHO. And its location.

I basically cover Southern California. Moreno Valley and San Bernardino typically have new ALJs cutting their teeth. I see why they are 2nd and 3rd.

Now, Santa Barbara is like paradise. The ALJs get there after paying their dues elsewhere. They are pretty casual. The same applies to Hawaii. More desirable places seem to breed apathy and lethargy just like for any normal person.

8:39 PM, May 02, 2018
Anonymous said...

My office has management and union official judges on reduced dockets, some newbies on the learning curve, and old-timers for whom 300 was the goal way back when they were hired. And a 1:0.75 ALJ:SCT ratio where it's hard to get cases out of POST. All this knocks down the dispo:day rate.

12:25 AM, May 03, 2018
Anonymous said...

No staffing. We have less than 1 writer per judge, so even if they are writing one case a day (which never happens) we will not get one disposition per day. We do not need judges- we need writers, and other staff.

4:29 AM, May 03, 2018
Anonymous said...

Santa Barbara Judges use to also go up to San Luis Obispo for hearings. I assume they still do this. So travel time would cut the amount of time the ALJs had to do actual work. And, in the fall there were fires which shut down many government offices for a few days then in January there was flooding and a landslide which also caused chaos for awhile since 101 was shut down.

2:42 PM, May 03, 2018
Anonymous said...

I want to talk about decision writing for a minute. You know how the pending writing crisis came about? Here's how:

The great recession kicked off a period of increased apps that was also fueled by the massive, aging Boomer cohort and big groups of more women that entered the workforce in the 70s and 80s. So after a year or so ODAR started getting all these claims. Budgets were bad initially and our backlog grew at I think every stage of our process.

We rightly recognized we needed more ALJs, but our genius top brass didn't listen to ODAR people when they said hiring only hundreds of new ALJs in a short span without commensurate staff hiring would be a bad idea, specifically predicting the UNWR blowup and even maybe seeing a lack of pulled cases ready for scheduling on the horizon. Oh, and OHO cases went from 60+% favorable to maybe 40% now. We do a lot of CDRs, which are harder. ALJs and everyone else expects much higher quality. And medical evidence page counts are up for a few reasons. So of course writing dramatically slowed. Top brass is so incensed about the drop in productivity but are too stupid to appreciate these factors and just believe the writers all just got lazy together at the same time or something. But I digress...

So once money got decent, around what, 2013, we started hiring ALJs like gangbusters and had been hiring them pretty steady the few years before that. But we had absurdly low writer and even lower sct hiring over that span.

So what happens? Those tons of new judges start doing their 500-700 dispositions a year and, whaddya know, pending writing blows up. And once we implemented the 75-day notice rule, we started seeing a really concerningly low number of pulled cases on hand ready to be scheduled for all these judges.

So top brass finally can't ignore the mountain of UNWR in front of their faces, and they start to finally address it in earnest last FY by hiring a few hundred writers. And they plan to hire nearly 500 more this year. Cool, pending writing is probably solved, but just as it was a few years of idiocy that caused it, it's going to take a couple years to clear it.

But wait, there's more! Even when they are ostensibly doing the right thing, guess what SSA brass decides to do with these new writer postings? Four year temporary terms. Four years in limbo! Just so that OHO can overhire writers to clear that backlog a few seconds earlier and then cut the excess loose during the temp period if we do indeed wind up with excess writers. It's unbelievably unconscionable that we are doing this, but we are. Just so our top brass can go to the hill and get their gold stars a bit earlier.

And don't even get me started on the current strategy from the top regarding writing: they literally don't change anything but yell at the writers to write more. And a streamlined fully favorable template that took almost two years to even start piloting. Ooh, shaving off a few minutes on the few FFs we have nonowadays--awesome work, guys.

So that's where the writing crisis came from. It's origin was most definitely the increased apps, but we had plenty of budget early enough and ODAR people saw the looming problem early enough that we could have acted and prevented the 75k+ cases we have waiting for decisions. It was unforced errors by our acting commissioner, Nancy Berryhill, and the one person she listens to (her chief of staff), who by my estimation contribute about 95% of all major decision making in SSA.

Don't believe their decisions were bad? Then why are we hiring under attrition levels for ALJs this year and next if we didn't overhire ALJs the last few?

This problem lies directly at the feet of Berryhill. Not writers. Not even Congress and the budget games they've played so much lately. Bad decision making from the top. And I'm sick of nobody saying it out loud and placing blame elsewhere.

5:58 PM, May 03, 2018
Anonymous said...

As a 30-year OHO Senior Attorney, I have to agree with @5:58 that the main culprit for the current mess is our rather abysmal leadership. You know, it's not rocket science...and yet, year after year these idiots keep perpetuating the same garbage policies resulting in the same awful outcomes. And so we lurch from crisis to crisis without ever really addressing the fundamental causes. Keystone Cops had nothing on OHO brass.

8:54 AM, May 04, 2018
Anonymous said...

Not all DDS's are created equal. Some require disability examiners to have a college degree and others, a GED will do. Salaries vary greatly, therefore, the quality of initial and reconsideration determinations vary as well. ALJ's with weak DDS's have extra work developing and cleaning up cases. Also, prototype states (SDM) severely hamper ALJ's, particularly with medical evidence. Prototype States include AK, AL, CO, LA, MI, MO, NH, NY, PA and parts of CA, and SDM II States include FL, GU, KS, KY, ME, NC, NV, VT, WA, and WV. My heart goes out to those ALJ's - no one at the hearing level understood the impact of Prototype/SDM until more recently. Do not blame the ALJ's on the DDS national policies that directly impact the ALJ workloads. Exceptionally poor leadership, which will get worse as experienced employees are racing out the door.

3:07 PM, May 25, 2018
Anonymous said...

Oh hell no. If you buy the writing backlog mysteriously appeared overnight I have a bridge to sell you cheap. You want more decisions? The answer is simple,let the attorney advisors, who know the law, hear and write the decisions. ALJs do not know the law and will not learn it. Fact not fiction.

7:24 PM, June 22, 2018

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