From the Washington Post:
Four-and-a-half years ago, the Social Security Administration set out to reduce a growing backlog in appeals from sick and disabled Americans who could no longer work but were denied disability benefits.
A study due out Monday concludes that despite these efforts and assertions by top agency officials that things have improved, the backlog has only grown in the last year — and a spike in new applications is threatening to swamp the system.
The review by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), an independent research organization at Syracuse University, found that 735,660 appeals will be pending in the current fiscal year, up from 705,367 in fiscal 2010. Applicants waiting for their appeals to be heard will wait 369 days on average, a big improvement from the peak of 514 days in 2008 but still more than a year, the report found. ...
Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue assailed the report as a “real disservice to disabled Americans” and Congress, whom he said will be misled by its conclusions. In the past two years, the agency has indeed struggled with a wave of new applications for disability benefits from about 200,000 people each year, he said.
But that growth should not be considered part of a backlog in processing appeals, which have edged closer to Social Security’s goal of 270 days to resolve, Astrue said.
“No matter what we do, we’re always going to have a certain number of cases in the queue,” he said. “We’ve made nothing but steady progress for four straight years.” He called the report “research fraud” for implying that new applicants become part of the backlog. ...
With budget cuts this year and more expected in the next fiscal year, Astrue said he does not expect to hire more administrative judges to handle appeals.
