Tennessee Man Arrested For Threatening ALJ

From KNOX:

A Knoxville man was arrested by federal agents when they learned he had been released from a mental health facility only a few days after allegedly vowing to murder a judge he had already stalked once in an ambush try.

Last month, Roy Kenneth Wade Jr. voluntarily sought help for depression and thoughts of killing himself, but during his medical and mental health evaluation stated that he also intended to kill Social Security Administrative Law Judge K. Dickson Grissom, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court. ...

Wade expressed "overwhelming anger and hate toward Judge Grissom" and was "adamant" in his desire to kill him, according to the affidavit. Wade added that he had a 9mm handgun and had already waited outside Grissom's office to shoot him, but that plan fell through when Grissom did not come out, according to the affidavit.

Scapegoating ALJs

     Jon Dubin and Robert Rains have written an Issue Brief for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy titled Scapegoating Social Security Disability Claimants (and the Judges Who Evaluate Them) in response to the Richard Pierce hit piece in Regulation, a publication of the Cato Institute. Here is one paragraph from the Dubin and Rains piece (footnote omitted):

Policy is often initiated, and sometimes adopted, based on popular misconceptions, partial truths, commonly repeated falsehoods, and isolated anecdotes with unfortunate consequences. Because neither the Pierce proposal’s media-anecdote-driven factual assumptions nor core legal suppositions about the identified problem are well-founded and because the proposed solutions are both misguided and unsound, this initiative, and other similar initiatives, should be non-starters.

     My experience tells me that if there were simple solutions that would produce consistent decision-making  on Social Security disability claims, we would long since have achieved those solutions. The people administering the Social Security disability programs, like the rest of us, occasionally do stupid things but they are far from stupid and they have had decades to study the problem. Disability determination has been studied many, many times over the years by outsiders and many of them spent far more time on it than Pierce. The only people who think there are easy solutions are people like Pierce, who have only studied the problems superficially.  I think the worst label one can put on a policy recommendation is "naive" and naive is the kindest thing I can say about what Pierce has written.

Report On 53rd Week Problem

     From report by Social Security's Office of Inspector General:

In an October 6, 2011 letter, [Congressional] Committee members expressed concern that managers in the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) may have instructed ALJs and hearing office employees to set aside their disability cases during the last week of September 2011 and refrain from issuing decisions until the following week, which would have delayed the award of benefits to thousands of claimants awaiting ALJ decisions. ...

Since as early as 1983, SSA has not counted workload totals for the 53rd week [of the Fiscal Year] in its year-end management information (MI) data. As a result, from September 24 through 30, 2011, also referred to as Week 53, SSA did not include its process workload count toward either its Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 or 2012 MI totals. This policy affected how workloads were counted throughout the Agency and not only ODAR’s hearing workloads. Several ODAR nationwide hearings workload counts, namely hearing dispositions and decisions written, decreased significantly during Week 53. For example, hearing dispositions dropped 87.8 percent compared to an average week in FY 2011. Even when we compared this workload decrease to end of FY 2010 data, this decline was significant. Other workloads, such as cases pulled and hearings held, did not appear to change. ODAR executives stated these Week 53 workload decreases may have related to some employees deferring certain workloads which did not count toward performance goals.

Why Hire A Paralegal When You Can Hire An Attorney For The Same Money?

     Law firms representing Social Security disability claimants frequently use paralegals and legal assistants to help their attorneys represent more clients. Lee Rosen, an NC attorney who practices family law, raises a issue that may extend to Social Security practice:

Over my 25 years of practicing law, I’ve seen the economy change quite a bit. The biggest impact in my little world has been the price of associates [that is, non-partner attorneys]. Over the years, it has come steadily down to the point where we can now pay an associate very, very little money.

That has an impact on the mix of employees in a law firm. I’d advocate that you stop hiring paralegals and replace them with lawyers.

      The current glut of young attorneys may not last a long time but if it does a lot of things are going to change in the legal profession.

Gotta File The Whole Appeal Online.

     From today's Federal Register:

We are clarifying the requirement that appointed representatives file certain appeals using our electronic systems in matters for which the representatives request direct fee payment. Specifically, we are clarifying that the electronic filing requirement includes both the submission of the forms we require to file the appeal request and the Disability Report--Appeal.

     Filing the appeal itself online is the easy part. Filing the Disability Report -- Appeal is the tedious, time-consuming part.

     Sending out tons of e-mail touting a webinar starting at a specific time to train people on how to file these appeals online and then not being able to handle the web traffic you generate for the webinar isn't a good way of encouraging compliance with this directive.

Oops!

     Social Security is now requiring that attorneys and others who represent Social Security claimants file appeals for their clients electronically if they want to receive direct payment of fees. To help educate everyone on how to file appeals online, Social Security sent out invitations to a "Webinar" today.

     I have heard from several attorneys who tried to access the "Webinar." They all say that they were not allowed to join the "Webinar."
     Update at 2:15 P.M. EST: I just tried to join the Webinar. I was able to but the video feed keeps hanging up.

If You Wonder What It's Like Representing Social Security Claimants

     A couple of months ago I advised a client who explicitly said he was disabled by psychiatric illness to get in psychiatric treatment. A month ago I called to see if he had done so. He told me that he hadn't gotten around to it yet. I restrained myself from asking why his busy schedule as a disabled person did not allow him time to get around to this. I just encouraged him to make the call. I checked back with him recently. Again, he said that he hadn't gotten around to it. Again, I encouraged him to get in treatment. Although he deserved it, I still did not inquire about why he couldn't find time to get in treatment. I just talked about the importance of psychiatric treatment to his case and to his life in general. He then told me that he had no intention of getting in psychiatric treatment because "I've been trying to get on Social Security disability for five years and I know very well what's disabling me." When I responded that the five year time he had been trying to get on Social Security suggested to me that he should try a new tack, he said he needed a different attorney. I told him, "Fine, I'll withdraw from representing you."

I Hadn't Heard This One Before

     I thought I had heard all of the criticisms of Social Security that there were but I was wrong. John Carney at CNBC digs up the very old criticism that Social Security leads inevitably to population decline because people will have fewer children because they will not feel the need to have children to support them in their old age. And I thought that the introduction of "The Pill" was the cause of the decline in fertility rates in the 1960s!