From a summary of remarks made by John Owens, Associate Commissioner, Office of Disability Determination, Social Security Administration at a conference of the National Association of Disability Examiners (NADE):
... The replacement for the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) is nearing completion. This new version, the Occupational Information System (OIS) is a collection of occupational-related data from multiple sources, which will be accessed through an online platform called the Vocational Information Tool (VIT). Testing of the OIS/VIS systems will begin in October 2019 with a focus group using the data in the development of vocational assessments in 5,000 that will be reviewed as part of a case study. ...I would caution readers that Social Security has been promising for years that a new OIS is just around the corner. Later in the same issue of the NADE newsletter, there’s this from a summary of remarks made by Gail Ennis, Social Security’s Inspector General:
... Ennis reported on the upcoming Vocational Information Tool. The initial implementation was targeted for fiscal year 2020. She noted a prior report on SSA's actions in updating the Department of Labor's Dictionary of Occupational Titles. She reported that a company had been contracted to build a Vocational Information Tool that would house Occupational Information System. She stated that SSA did not accurately capture all information needed for disability determinations, including the mental demands of work, as well as the current diverse occupational fields. SSA plans to update the system in FY 2024 and at that time, this information should be included. SSA intends to update the Occupational Informational System every five years. ...
10 comments:
Be careful in what you hope for, this means a lot of unbillable hours learning the new DOT, and changes may not all be in favor of the Claimant since there are more work from home options where you can sit/stand at will, more assistive tech available than ever before and who knows what else.
@8:53
I'm not sure anyone would argue that an change/update to the occupational system would be across the board claimant-favorable. I'm just tired of hearing a VE say the claimant can go be a surveillance system monitor, haberdasher, cane cutter, or elevator operator; jobs which do not exist in significant numbers in the national economy in the modern day.
As I see it, I expect an update will shift the ratio of exertion-heavy jobs to skill-heavy jobs. That would benefit mental impairment over physical impairment, from a claimant's perspective.
As to working from home, sit/stand options, and assistive tech; are those being considered to be part of the update? Those all sound like accommodations, and there are a lot of arguments against relying on the good will of an individual employer, particularly when a VE is testifying just to the availability of work in the national economy. And, those arguments aren't reliant on the DOT being outdated, so I'm not sure why an update would make that reasoning more defendable.
I'm sure the VEs will now say all our clients can be work at home telemarketers.
Reps hate the DOT.....until the agency tries to replace the DOT
It'll be great when the program includes job numbers and covers a wide area of physical and mental limitations. ALJs won't need VEs anymore, and hearings will be 10 minutes shorter like they are with a child's case.
As we move towards the gig economy, and the normalizing of folks with ADHD and ASD, SSA is going to have to loosen up its rerequirement that all jobs at step 5 be traditional full-time in-office positions with little accommodation for time off task.
@8:53 You forgot about the silver wrapper, the ticket taker, and the order caller.
I don't have as much of a problem with these jobs from the DOT(though in my 70 plus years on the planet, I've never met anyone who did them full time), but I'm curious as to where they get these numbers. The numbers of these mythical jobs have increased greatly since the economy is supposedly doing so great.
@6:28
Most of what you are complaining of is actually not based on statute or regulation, it is from the VEs choosing to provide in-office, 9 to 5 traditional jobs.
If a VE wants to give, for example, a door-to-door salesperson in response to an ALJ's hypothetical provides for say, 7 hour shifts, 6 days per week work for someone with claustrophobia, nothing prevents that currently. The regs do require an ALJ's RFC to be in regard to work on a "regular and continuing basis" (i.e. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, OR EQUIVALENT).
The issue with the gig economy is, if the claimant can be assumed to work in a gig job, where their hours, work conditions, etc. are at their discretion, who wouldn't be disqualified? I suppose if you were in an iron lung, maybe, although even then, why couldn't someone in an iron lung make cold calls from their cell phone?
If this means the VEs will be making less and less up then I'm for it.
SSA has deflected questions about how it will deal with some concerning issues regarding the OIS. The one that bothers me the most is that OIS compresses about 11,000 job listings in the DOT down less than 1,000 job categories. Imagine what will happen when you try to define a disability claimant's past work. Undoubtedly, whatever of those <1,000 "jobs" the claimant's work is pidgeon-holed into will include descriptions of many duties which in fact will not accurately describe what the claimant was doing, but will instead include duties from at least several if not more distinct jobs.
Because so many actual jobs are compressed into so few OIS job listings, each OIS job listing will likely list skills which the claimant did not acquire, duties that the claimant did not perform, and requirements the claimant never had to meet, on a predictably (let's say 11x) larger scale. Will adjudicators assume the claimant learned and did all those things when clearly they did not? Will disability adjudication become excessively more time intensive and complex, as we have to slog through each overbroad OIS job description to determine which of the many duties, skills and categories were involved in each job a claimant performed? I don't see an easy way around it that could lead to any kind of accurate determination, unless perhaps if you eliminated the "as generally performed" requirement at step 4 of the sequential evaluation (although that would still leave the issue of acquired skills at step 5).
SSA has never announced how it will deal with that problem to my knowledge. If it does not figure that out, then OIS will not be accurate and reliable for that critical aspect of disability adjudication. That's surely something you would want to figure out before you spent years and millions of dollars on a project. I hope for the taxpayer's sake that SSA has exercised such forethought and has good answers. We'll see.
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