I'm hearing from the National Organization of Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) that Social Security has decided to ditch centralized scheduling of Administrative Law Judge hearings. We'll go back to having individual hearing offices scheduling hearings beginning February 1, 2023. This is overdue. Centralized scheduling has been a failure from every point of view. It's one of the endless examples of the longstanding instinct of high level Social Security officials that smaller agency components such as hearing offices are inefficient and the only way for things to get better is to centralize as much as possible. It seems like these centralization schemes always fail. Hearing offices scheduling of hearings wasn't perfect but it wasn't bad. There was never a good reason to expect that centralized scheduling was going to help from any point of view.
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Agreed. Another failure of SSA's top down approach from its top heavy management structure. Agency desperately needs to be restructured, to reallocate positions to the front lines.
ReplyDeleteI had an off the record conversation with an ALJ earlier this month who told me that the ALJ union was pushing to eliminate the CSU also.
ReplyDeleteI thought centralized scheduling was great. It was pretty straight forward; send in your available dates, and SSA scheduled hearings on those dates. The few times there were conflicts/mistakes, it was swiftly corrected with an e-mail. It was less staff time taking calls and playing phone tag with the hearing offices to get cases scheduled. Once we got in the swing of sending in available dates, centralized scheduling was pretty smooth.
ReplyDeleteThe next bright idea is to not have specific clerks assigned to an ALJ for workload processing. This was tried before, and it was a cluster. Guess some SES wasn't around for that.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with assigning staff to particular ALJs is that certain judges are intolerable to work for, for various reasons. Particularly for SSA’s low wages. So staff just leave, and the work gets distributed elsewhere anyway.
DeleteThey need to go back to the old team system. You work with the same people and you really work as a team. Do not assign teams, let people make ranked choices. Believe it or not some people want to work with that person who may be seen as difficult. When you let people choose their teams, they are invested in making it work. When you force teams, you get resentment.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, those who rail against centralized workflows are generally people who don’t do their jobs properly (for whatever reason) and miss having a team of bootlickers to pick up their slack and cover for their laziness, incompetence, etc.
DeleteThere’s no legitimate reason a national program can’t be administered at a national level by diffusely scattered personnel.
There's a difference between diffusely scattered and disconnected. With decisions made top down, executives don't consider variances that local people understand.
DeleteContracting out to big firms to supply VHRs, for example, was great for national contracting officials, but has led to local disruptions, especially outside large metro areas.
National hearing center judges like their dedicated help and status, and lighter workloads, compared to local hearing office judges. But reps still seem to prefer working with local hearing office in judges familiar to them and the geographic service area.
They treated ALJ's the same crappy way they treated representatives. I just got an email asking about available times in May. If I give them May availability and find out in January that I need to take my kid to the doctor in May, even though they have not yet scheduled any hearings for me in May, they act like I punched their grandmother if I supplement my availability. I've heard they treat the ALJs the same way. They expect everyone to live and breathe the SSA and not have anything else going on in life. The people that run the agency treat everyone involved like they work at a fast food restaurant. And, that's why you have everyone quitting. Just like people quit working at Jack in the Box.
ReplyDelete125 you appear to be confusing efficiency for effectiveness. Have you ever really worked in a Hearing Office? If you have then you would know that it takes a team effort to make this process work.
ReplyDeleteI was a manager at OHO and agree having specific CTs/SCTs/HCSR/HCSSs assigned to judges was a nightmare. This was because a big percentage of ALJs are tyrants, and giving them the idea they "have an employee" of their own at their beckon call yielded not great results and fed the worst parts of those monsters.
ReplyDeleteA big challenge with CSUs was that SSA really only got halfway to true centralization. It wasn't one big national unit scheduling everything; it was region by region.
ReplyDeleteSo if you were a rep who worked in many regions, it didn't function well because one region couldn't easily see what you'd been scheduled for in other regions and you had to send your availability far in advance to multiple CSUs (and sometimes, especially during the pandemic, your case was transferred to a region you'd never worked in and wouldn't have known to send availability to!)
And if you were a rep who only worked in one or two hearing offices, it was worse than just building up relationships with the schedulers in those offices.
CSU was probably better than single-office scheduling for the reps who worked in many hearing offices all in the same region but I'm not sure that is terribly common.
Another CSU challenge was that if a rep caught a problem (scheduled for hearings in two regions at once, scheduled on a date the CSU had been informed was unavailable, etc.) within a day or two, they could call the CSU to get it fixed. But if the CSU didn't fix it almost immediately, or if the rep didn't see it soon enough, the power to change it left the CSU and went to the hearing office. And the hearing offices were very unsympathetic--if you'd been scheduled for hearings at the same time in HO A and HO B, each one would push you to change the other hearing.
The other scheduling challenge is that firms work so differently: some put one rep's name on every 1696 and then farm out the work to different reps once hearings are scheduled (so a CSU could schedule a hearing for Joe Partner in Maine at the same time as one in Connecticut) and some put the actual name of who is going to do the hearing. Fixing that probably involves stuff far beyond scheduling, like how firms and reps are paid and how Appointed Representative Services/ERE works. In other words, it probably won't be fixed any time soon and SSA needs to work around it when figuring out scheduling.
I don't think ALJs liked centralized scheduling either because the schedulers were less responsive to their individual desires. I don't know how it worked for interpreters, vocational or medical experts, or other hearing participants.
I think the concept of centralized scheduling makes a lot of sense, especially with the higher percentage of hearings being done remotely and most VEs, MEs, and interpreters calling in even to in-person hearings. But it would need to be full centralization, not the piecemeal approach SSA tried and failed at.