From
Social Security Ruling 17-4p to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow:
... We expect
individuals
to exercise their reasonable good faith judgment about
what evidence “relates” to
their
disability claims. Evidence that may relate to whether
or not a claimant is blind or disabled includes objective medical evidence, medical
opinion evidence, other medical evidence,
and evidence from nonmedical sources. ...
[W]e expect representatives to
submit or inform us about written evidence
as soon as they
obtain or
become aware of it.
Representatives should not wait until 5 business days before the hearing to submit or
inform us about written evidence
unless
they have
compelling
reasons for the delay
(e.g.,
it was impractical to submit the evidence earlier because it was difficult to obtain or the
representative was not aware of the evidence at an earlier date).
In addition, it is only
acceptable for a representative to inform
us about
evidence
without submitting
it
if
the
representative shows
that, despite good faith efforts,
he or she
could not obtain the
evidence.
Simply informing us of the existence of evidence without providing it
or
waiting until 5
days before a hearing to
inform us
about
or
provide evidence when it was
otherwise available,
may
cause
unreasonable
delay
to
the processing of the claim, without
good cause, and may be prejudicial to the fair and orderly conduct of our administrative
proceedings.
As such, this behavior
could be found to
violate
our
rules of conduct and
could lead to sanction
proceedings against
the representative. ...
We
will evaluate each circumstance on a
case-by-case
basis to determine whether
to refer a possible violation of our rules
to
our
Office of the General Counsel
(OGC)
.
For
example,
in accordance with the regulatory interpretation discussed above,
we may refer
a possible violation of rules
to
OGC
when:
a
representative informs us about written evidence but refuses, without good
cause,
to
make good faith efforts to obtain and timely submit
the
evidence;
a
representative informs
us about evidence that relates to
a
claim instead of acting
with reasonable promptness to help obtain and
timely submit
the evidence to us;
the
representative waits until 5
days before a hearing to provide or inform us of
evidence when the evidence was known to the representative
or
available to
provide to
us
at an earlier date;
the clients of a particular representative have a pattern of informing us about
written evidence instead of making good-faith efforts to obtain
and timely submit
the
evidence;
or
any other occasion when a representative’s actions with regard to the submission
of evidence
may
violate
our
rules for representative. ...
I do not know if there is any practical way to notify the Social Security Administration immediately of the existence of new medical evidence. Am I supposed to send Social Security a notice about each visit my client has with a physician? Am I required to separately obtain a report on each physician visit? This appears to impose a duty upon an attorney to obtain every piece of medical evidence concerning a client -- including the hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of records generated by each hospitalization. The Ruling says we can't just inform Social Security of the existence of evidence. We have to obtain it and there is no limit upon this duty. How reasonable is this?
I know there's some people that Social Security wants to put out of business. They probably deserve to be put out of business but this is over the top. No one will be able to strictly comply with this. No one.
