One of my firm’s legal assistants e-mailed me yesterday afternoon with a question. She had been on the phone with a Social Security employee inquiring about a delay in benefit payment to a client. She had been told that it was a “national stagger walk case.” She wanted to know what that was. It took me a few minutes but I eventually figured out that she must have misunderstood what had been said, that the Social Security employee must have been referring to the Steigerwald v. Berryhill class action on computation of SSI back benefits when the claimant had been represented and there was also a Disability Insurance Benefits claim. I think I need to get out some information about Steigerwald to the legal assistants at my firm.
This raises the question: What is going on now with Steigerwald at Social Security? Have they conceded that they’ll have to make the recomputations? How do they plan to do it? How much disruption will this cause?
4 comments:
They are currently being computed and paid and the court has given 8 months to have them completed. This will create backlogs in other workloads because Stiegerwald is *the* priority now.
Hmm. We have seen a recent delay in notice of awards being issued. Curious if that is related. As to whether SSA is following the Court's order, it appears they are trying to:
http://www.steigerwaldclassaction.com/media/1984197/102_combined.pdf
@11:03
According to the Court's order, SSA said each case takes 4 hours to process. Class is 129,695 members. So that is 518,780 hours of work. Eight months is 17 1/3 weeks. Assuming 40 hours per week, that's 693 1/3 hours per employee dedicated to the issue. So putting this in context, SSA has to dedicate 748.24 employees to the task (129695 x 4 = 518780; 52 / 3 x 40 = 693.33; 518780 / 693.33 = 748.24). SSA said only specialized employees can carryout the task though, so there is some vagueness as to how much of a burden this is on SSA. Good to hear SSA is prioritizing the issue though.
"Stagger Walk" case...that's priceless. As a boss, myself, I would have to give said assistant a Koodo's on that one. That would have made my day. Serious issue of course, but it's the little things that make being in charge worth it. d:-)
SSA does need specialized employees to handle this task. It can be a very messy recomp of a messy windfall offset comp. I tried to get them to rehire me because I started doing windfall offset in the early 80's when the law was enacted and continued doing it through 2017. But they decided to use the existing employees in the PC and the field. I gave basic windfall offset training to all journeyman claims specialists in multiple offices, but only a small number ever fully understood or had the time to learn it well.
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