The report shown below was obtained from Social Security by the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) and published in its newsletter, which is not available online to non-members. It contains basic operating statistics for Social Security's Office of Hearings Operations (OHO).
Note that the average processing time jumped from 301 days at the end of last year to 351 days as of July. I posted about this last month and received responses basically saying "What's the problem? The total number pending is down." Who outside Social Security cares what the total number pending is? What people outside the agency care about is how long it takes to get a hearing and a decision. Even though fewer appeals are being filed, it's taking longer and longer to get a hearing and a decision. That's important. There are a multitude of problems at Social Security. This is one of them. Like many of those problems, this one is going to get worse. There is a huge backlog of cases stuck at the initial and reconsideration levels. Those backlogs will eventually be worked down, leading to more appeals. Everyone expects an avalanche of disability claims once the field offices reopen.
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9 comments:
Job security.
Well, that deluge that you and everyone else in the world aside from me apparently isn't here yet, right? And total pending keeps dropping, right? And OHO staffing is nearly constant, right?
So what if I told you the more recent reverse of APT and increase to that stat despite these facts and the overall decreasing pending was due to the ancient claims OHO either cannot dismiss or cannot yet hold the hearing in-person as the claimant has required that have been stagnant for 1.5 years (or about 550 days). And that, so long as you weren't a lost claimant looking at a dismissal or a claimant steadfastly refusing video, you'll get a hearing closer to a couple months from your RFH?
I suspect Charles wouldn't care much because that set of facts doesn't lend itself to his narrative of terrible SSA employees needing to be corralled back into their offices ASAP.
This is largely due to a group of reps that refuse to proceed with a phone or video hearing under any circumstance include a global pandemic. Those cases cannot be scheduled and are dragging up the average.
Makes sense. The OHOs in Region 7 literally went from April to August only limiting the number of hearings the ALJs could get scheduled. I believe most ALJ's were at 30-50% capacity for those months. The region lifted the scheduling order in September.
9:41 nailed it. Several current dockets consist of requests for hearing from February and March 2021. Since cases where claimants have fallen off the face of the Earth and can’t be scheduled or dismissed are languishing, they’re artificially increasing the APT. If the offices ever reopen or if OHO ever gives guidance that these folks can be scheduled/dismissed, you’ll see APT and pending plummet.
I’d be curious to know how many reps here that accept phone/OVH are experiencing a 300+ day delay on getting their cases heard. One rep recently told me they weren’t sure what they’re going to do next year because all their cases were getting scheduled this summer/fall within months of the RFH. I just checked my Thursday docket, and one RFH is older than a year due to the rep’s initial declination of a phone hearing. The others are December 2020, March 2021 (x3) and April 2021.
The problem is, there are a lot of claimants who will not respond to the HO or answer their phones, or who refuse phone hearings. Because we are forbidden to dismiss any of the serial no-shows, the clock keeps ticking, bringing the whole thing down.
What 10:51 said. Plus, there is still a restriction in place to dismissing cases where the claimant failed to appear for the hearing, but there is no agreement to a phone/video hearing in the file. Between people holding out for in-person hearings, representatives who lost contact with clients and then objected to a video hearing as a means to draw out the appeal, and abandoned appeals that cannot be dismissed, there are a lot of zombie cases lingering in the system and making it seem like processing times are increasing. It's really not a mystery or surprising why case processing times are rising while most hearing offices don't have enough cases to fill dockets for judges.
Phone hearings are here to stay for a while. I have been doing more video hearings on Microsoft Teams. I believe more video hearings will be the first step before full reopening. A rep should seriously consider accepting these to process these claims. This probably was going to happen more even without the pandemic. Wave of the future.
@12:53
I've never seen an ALJ use hearing observations of the claimant in support of an award, but often see it in support of a denial. We agree to phone hearings, but have no interest in agreeing to video hearings on that basis.
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