Social Security wanted to fire Administrative Law Judge Michael Levinson of Macon, GA for some very unjudicial conduct. The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has jurisdiction over this kind of matter. An MSPB ALJ decided to suspend Levinson from his job as an ALJ for 2 years and to downgrade him in rank. Both Levinson and Social Security appealed to the full MSPB which changed Levinson's penalty to what Social Security wanted, firing.
It's a tiny minority of ALJs who behave as Levinson did but we have to get them out of their jobs. I'm shocked that the MSPB ALJ thought that anything less than firing was appropriate. The behavior here was way beyond the pale.
By the way, Levinson approved claims at a somewhat higher rate than most ALJs. Would things have proceeded differently if Levinson had a low allowance rate?
8 comments:
In what universe is there conduct that is so severe it warrants a 2 year suspension but isn’t severe enough to warrant removal. Mind boggling decision by the original judge.
For all you non managers out there, dealing with problems like this is a small portion of what managers "do all day."
anon@2:29pm,
Yeah, pull the other finger. Most of the ones I know, if they were working in the private sector, would barely have the intelligence to qualify for a position asking the question "You want fries with that?".
When I was first hired 30 years ago, I had managers that still had technical skills. They might not have been able to process the work, but they did have the ability to understand why we did what we did and why something was old when we explained it to them. Twenty years ago, our office manager wasn't above working the mail, assisting with answering the phone, or even working the front window if we needed help. Didn't even have to ask him, he'd just see we needed the help and did it because it needed to be done. Heck, our cluster district manager even came to our office once for a week straight and worked our front window for us when we were really short handed, and actually did a halfway decent job of it.
Current management has little to no technical knowledge. They know nothing that can't be gleaned from reading a WAC list (a 6th grade educational accomplishment at best), phone queue age tracking, or wait time tracking. SSA has truly absorbed the lessons of promoting its problems rather than slapping them down. They took the qualities that made them subpar technicians at best and turned themselves into subpar managers. They arrogantly consider themselves better than the riff-raff that works for them, who they consider lazy and ungrateful. They won't help answer the phone, but they can and will spend an entire afternoon sending out emails willy-nilly demanding that everyone else drop what they are doing one minute to answer the phone, then turn around and throw a temper tantrum because the wait times at the window are too long the next.
Honestly, management is 3/4 of the problem with SSA at this point. They wrote and implemented every single red tape policy that gums up and slows everything down (policies which they want us to ignore when it would be advantageous in order to make them look better, but which they'll turn around and stab you in the back with the instant someone complains or something bad happens "because you didn't follow policy"). They were the ones who created SSA's "quality by software design" IT system plan whereby each subsequent release of something is more and more disjointed and slower than the system it replaced, requiring more and more and more steps to accomplish the same workloads. All because they lack the ability to deal with the incompetent employees they hired and then failed to train properly because SSA's training system is a joke.
In another 5 years, SSA will replace IRS and the federal government's "joke agency". Hope they enjoy the designation, as hopefully I will be retired by then.
5:05 you completely missed the point. Most managers time is occupied by problems. Problem employees, problem upper management, problem customers, most all of which are outside their control. I agree technical knowledge is needed but many of these problems are not technical in nature. They are people based. If employees were all motivated and self directed to solve their own problems I am sure managers would love that. But that is not the case in most any business or company or gov agency so here we are.
5:05 may have missed your point, but nails it on the dysfunctional decision-making at HQ that has put us where we are.
He was in Birmingham for many years. While he did the do the handpicking of experts as noted in the MSPB ruling, he also regularly gave a choice to any claimant's attorney under 50 or just anyone 50 or over that he might not like for whatever reason. This choice was accept a closed period to some random date (not based on the record in any way) or go to a "full hearing" wherein he would deny the case. Guess which choice claimants most often chose?
Also, he would answer his cell phone in the middle of hearings for years and just walk out of the room to take the call without any explanation.
If you had an afternoon hearing, sometimes he would be exhausted from morning hearing chaos he inflicted and he would be sort of quiet and easier to deal with.
Unless you have done a Levinson hearing, it's really hard to convey how hard he was to deal with. Almost every hearing came away with a claimant thinking that they got the "crazy" judge.
Also at the Birmingham office when he was there was Paul Conger....
https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2017/03/former_social_security_judge_s.html
5:05 got it exactly right.
Most ALJs on administrative leave also get paid during the course of litigation.... so it was an easy profitable vacation of sorts for Judge Levinson while he waited to get fired. And yes, upper management has serious issues...fish rots from the head down. Prime example - they created all of these ridiculous hoops to jump through during covid for processing dismissals. Hearing offices were to dig to the other side of the world to locate people for hearings if they did not show up... now they are waiving their dictatorial wands at hearing offices and screeching about aged cases.. most of which were created by their policies. And they wonder why SSA was number 17 out of 17 in the FEV survey...and now they send emails ad nauseam while we are trying to work reminding us to fill out the new one...
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