Priority Processing At The Appeals Council -- What A List!

     This month's issue of the newsletter (not available online) of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) has an article prepared by the Social Security on priority processing at the Appeals Council, which has a huge backlog. Here's an excerpt:

A list of the Appeals Council-level cases with newly submitted evidence is generated several times a week. A group of employees has started screening the listed cases to see if they meet any of the 21 circumstances below. If so, the branch chief receives the case and assigns it for priority processing. The circumstances are:

(1) Age 55
(2) Any indication or report of death
(3) Hospice, nursing care, or claimant cannot care for personal needs
(4) Intensive care unit for more than 3 days
(5) Hospitalization for more than 7 days
(6) Transplant notes (kidney, heart, heart/lung, liver or bone marrow, etc.)
(7) Transplant waiting list
(8) Cancer with poor or no response to treatment
(9) Cancer that has spread to other areas/
(10) Coma
(11) Heart attack or myocardial infarction
(12) Stroke, or cerebral vascular accident
(13) Prescribed use of home oxygen 
(14) Prescribed use of wheelchair
(15) VA disability rating of 70% or more
(16) Letter or notice approving other forms of disability payments
(17) Medical report(s) of a terminal prognosis
(18) Dialysis or End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD)
(19) Blood transfusion(s)
(20) Bed or home confinement
(21) Very rare, unusual, or compassionate allowance diagnoses

Although attaining the age of 55 is on the list, it is not necessary to submit additional evidence of a claimant’s age as SSA also screens for this. If the claimant has died, representative correspondence to that effect is sufficient. NOSSCR is working with SSA to obtain written documentation of this practice.

To verify that the Appeals Council knows a client meets one of the 21 circumstances, call the Congressional and Public Affairs Branch at 1-877-670-2722 or fax Appeals Council Ombudsman Terry Jensen at 703-605-8691.

Cases that meet one of the 21 circumstances still should not be decided in less than 25 days unless the Appeals Council obtains permission from the claimant or representative to make a faster decision. See adjacent article on this page for more information.

     This is a far more extensive list of types of cases to be expedited than is used at the Administrative Law Judge level. Why shouldn't these cases by expedited at all levels?
     I think the existence of these lists of types of cases to be expedited demonstrates the pressures caused by backlogs at Social Security. This isn't about helping people who are hurting. They're trying to expedite the cases that would make for good newspaper or television pieces on the suffering caused by the backlog.

Social Security Subcommittee Schedules Hearing On "Protecting Social Security from Waste, Fraud, and Abuse"

     The House Social Security Subcommittee has scheduled a hearing for 10:00 on May 18 on "Protecting Social Security from Waste, Fraud, and Abuse." No specifics are given at this point. At the Senate Homeland Security and Government Operations Committee hearing last week there was a mention of some fraud case that would be bigger than the allegations against Eric Conn but no specifics were mentioned. Perhaps there will be some indictment or indictments this week.

I Have Some Questions

     I had time over the weekend to watch the hearing held last week by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Operations on Social Security's plan to bring in some Administrative Appeals Judges (AAJs) to hold some hearings now being held by Administrative Law Judges (ALJs). The Committee members asked thoughtful questions but I have some questions that I wished they had asked:

1. Will AAJ decisions be subject to quality assurance reviews either before or after the decision is issued? 
2. What productivity does Social Security expect from these AAJs, especially considering the travel they will be doing?
3. Will all the AAJs be located in the Falls Church, VA area where the Appeals Council is located or will some be located around the country?
4. Hearing non-disability cases, especially those other than overpayment cases, takes unusual knowledge. Will there be extraordinary training for these AAJs? Do not assume that even experienced Social Security attorneys have this knowledge because they don't.
5. Social Security indicates that geographic limitations imposed by ALJ applicants make it difficult for them to hire. Many applicants may want to work in some offices while few, if any, want to work in other offices. However, a new, much larger register is due out in about a year. Presumably, there will then be multiple candidates for each office with an opening. Why not just hire ALJs now where you can and then hire later for the other offices for which you currently lack candidates? It's not like there's an oversupply of ALJs anywhere.
6. Social Security says that currently 30% of claimants opt out of video hearings. Isn't that still going to require AAJs to do a lot of traveling, doing one hearing at one location, then getting on a plane to another location to do one more hearing?
7. Will the opt out figure stay at 30% if Social Security goes ahead with this plan? Social Security has a history of short-sighted thinking on this issue. They thought that requiring claimants to opt out of video hearings shortly after filing a request for hearing would result in fewer claimants opting out of video hearings but the exact opposite happened. I expect there are many attorneys now who don't bother opting out of video hearings since they think it unlikely that Social Security would try to schedule video hearings for their clients. Go ahead with this plan and attorney behavior may change. Maybe I'm wrong on this but I correctly guessed that requiring claimants to opt out of video hearings shortly after filing a request for hearing would result in more claimants opting out of video hearings.

The Inadequacy Of Online Claims Filing

     Note to anyone who thinks Social Security will soon be able to transact all its business online: You still can't file a claim for Supplemental Security Income Benefits online. You can't even file a claim for Disabled Widows or Widowers Benefits online. Social Security has a long way to go with its online systems and I've seen little, if any, progress in years. To repeat, I've seen little, if any, progress in years in Social Security's online systems in years.

Are White-Collar Workers Susceptible To Age-Related Loss Of Job Skills?

     The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has issued a brief report on How Do Job Skills That Decline With Age Affect White-Collar Workers? It's far from definitive but the authors' conclusion is that white collar jobs do require skills that decline with age and some white collar jobs are more susceptible to this than others. Two examples would be airline pilot and photographer. 

     The authors try to scale jobs based upon susceptibility to age-related loss of job skills. Here's a couple of charts from the report:

The "Augmentation Strategy"

     From the statement of Teresa Gruber, Social Security's Deputy Commissioner for Disability Adjudication and Review, to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs yesterday:  

The cases targeted for the augmentation strategy represent only 3.6 percent of our hearings pending and the non-disability cases often involve issues that ALJs [Administrative Law Judges] do not typically encounter.

A small number of AAJs [Administrative Appeals Judges] and staff will specialize in adjudicating the non-disability issues, thus freeing up critical ALJ resources to handle disability hearings. But I want to be clear. Although the augmentation strategy is consistent with the Act and our regulations, this is a temporary initiative aimed at addressing a current need – bringing wait times down to 270 days. It allows us to use highly qualified adjudicators, whom we have thoroughly vetted, as we continue with our extraordinary efforts to hire more ALJs. The augmentation strategy is not part of a plan to replace ALJs in our hearings process.

The augmentation strategy is based on longstanding agency regulations. Since the beginning of the Social Security hearings process in 1940, our regulations have authorized the members of the Appeals Council to hold hearings. Under our current regulations, the Appeals Council has the authority to remove a pending hearing request from an ALJ, hold the hearing, and issue the decision. Moreover, nothing in our existing regulations precludes the Appeals Council from holding a hearing in a case that is before it on request for review or on remand from a Federal court.

When a claimant is dissatisfied with an ALJ hearing decision, she can appeal to the Council. Thus the second set of cases are a subset of cases already before the Council – cases where the Council could have completed action on the appeal but have generally remanded back to the ALJ. Under the augmentation strategy, the Council will complete the action on the case and issue the final decision, thus preventing an additional workload from returning to the hearing offices and freeing ALJs to hold hearings on other cases. The sole objective of this strategy is to increase capacity to hold more hearings and issue decisions so that we can, collectively, reduce the time people and their families are waiting for a decision.

     How can hiring AAJs to do non-disability hearings possibly help more than hiring ALJs? The AAJs will have to spend a large part of their time roaming around the country, far more than ALJs who are already located around the country. I would guess that their productivity will be half that of ALJs. I know that Social Security complains that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) won't give them a bigger roster from which to select ALJs yet there are hundreds of names on the roster now and a new roster is coming. Why take as extreme a step as Social Security is planning? How is this going to look in a few years when a study is done comparing productivity of ALJs and AAJs?

Never Heard Of This Happening Before

     From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The Social Security Administration has taken away the benefits of about 70 police officers at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport after determining they are not eligible due to an agreement the state of Missouri signed 65 years ago.

Sen. Claire McCaskill says the agency is misreading the agreement, but a Social Security spokesman said that the agency determined that the airport officers are St. Louis police as defined by the agreement, and that the state of Missouri “never requested Social Security coverage for this position.”

The airport security workers will be refunded the amount of money they have paid into the system through the years, according to an aide for McCaskill, D-Mo. But because they have been defined as St. Louis police officers by the Social Security Administration, they will also be ineligible for Social Security, and they face a murky fix on how to make up the loss of benefits.

McCaskill, in a letter Tuesday to Acting Commissioner of Social Security Carolyn Colvin, said that she believed the benefits were removed because of an incorrect reading of a “218 agreement” that Missouri and the Social Security Administration signed in 1951.

That agreement defined which local government workers would be covered under Social Security, and which would receive retirement benefits from Missouri. It was signed before airport security was necessary, a spokesman for McCaskill said. ...

     I don't understand how Social Security can correct the earnings records to take down the quarters of coverage. Normally, they can't go back more than 3 years, 3 months and 15 days to correct an earnings record. There are exceptions to that time limit in 42 U.S.C. §405(c)(5) but I don't see one that would apply to this situation.

Who Cares Who The Public Trustees Are?

     The Senate Finance Committee is holding a hearing today on the re-nominations of Charles Blahous and Robert Reischauer to stay on as public trustees of the Social Security Trust Funds. 

     Michael Hiltzik has written a column in opposition to the Blahous nomination on the grounds that Blahous has been consistently hostile to Social Security throughout his public life. Blahous thinks benefits are too high, he opposed extending the Disability Trust Fund, he was a major figure in former President George W. Bush's campaign to partially privatize Social Security, he constantly warns that the Trust Funds are running out of money but opposes any plan for them other than wholesale benefits cut as soon as possible, etc.

     I would agree with Hiltzik's opposition to the Blahous re-nomination except for the facts that the public trustees have no power and Blahous' efforts over the years, maybe decades, to undermine Social Security have been worse than useless. Support for Social Security has never been stronger. If anything former President George W. Bush's politically disastrous plan to partially privatize Social Security which Blahous promoted, helped demonstrate just how popular Social Security is.

     So go ahead, keep Blahous as a public trustee. He can't do any harm. As far as I'm concerned, he can use whatever podium you can get to spout his fear-mongering. Nobody cares what he thinks other than some of his fellow Republicans and probably not even a majority of them.  Even Republican officeholders who agree with him are terrified of actually following through on his ideas.