Dec 15, 2020

Merry Christmas


 

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Dec 14, 2020

Video Hearing Stats

      Social Security has posted numbers showing how many video hearings it has held recently. These are hearings where the claimant is at home connecting via a laptop, tablet computer or cell phone. The numbers are confusing since it includes a column purporting to show the number of in-person hearings being held but that's not the case. No in-person hearings have been held since March. Maybe that column is actually the number of telephone hearings? 
     Obviously, this is very uneven. I don't know what accounts for some offices holding no video hearings while others have held many video hearings.
     I wish that the agency would show totals per region and nationally.

 Hearing Office                                  In-person(?)   Video    Total

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Merry Christmas


 

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Dec 13, 2020

Merry Christmas

 


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Dec 12, 2020

Merry Christmas

 


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Dec 11, 2020

OHO Productivity Continues To Decline

        The report shown below was obtained from Social Security by the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) and published in its newsletter, which is not available online to non-members. It is basic operating statistics for Social Security's Office of Hearings Operations. 

     I know the backlog is down under a year. Big whoop. I was around when it was three months. Yes, it really was that low at one time and not just briefly. Take a look at Blankenship v. HEW, 587 F2d 329 (6th Cir. 1978). A District Court ordered that Social Security hearings be held in 90 days. The Court of Appeals found that to be unreasonable but also found that 220 days national average at that time was also unreasonable. Yes, I know the Supreme Court later said the courts can't put time limits on Social Security hearings but I'm talking here about an erosion of values. We've come to expect service that would have once seemed unimaginably poor. We need to get these backlogs down as low as we can. You have to give 75 days notice? So what? Claimants and their attorneys will generally waive that time frame. Besides, that 75 day time frame is an issue only in a few areas of the country. Get the backlog down now while you can. Everyone expects an avalanche of claims as the pandemic wanes.

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Merry Christmas

 


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Dec 10, 2020

Foreshadowing At The Supreme Court

      Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Collins v. Mnuchin which concerns two quasi-governmental corporations. The issue was whether in the wake of the Court's Seila Law opinion there was a constitutional problem with the President's inability to remove the heads of these corporations. There is a similar issue affecting the position of Commissioner of Social Security. It was clear from the questions asked that at least two of the justices are already thinking about what they will do when the Social Security case reaches the Court. Below are a couple of excerpts from the transcript of the oral arguments. I'm not including the answers since I think those are much less important to us than the questions.

Justice Alito:  Suppose we were to agree with Mr. Nielson that this can't be distinguished from the -- the head of the Social Security Administration, or suppose we were to overrule Humphrey's Executor, as some members of the Court have suggested. Do you think it would follow that everything ever done by a Social Security administrator or everything ever done by the FCC or one of the other multi-member commissions was void ab initio, they would all be wiped off the books? 

Justice Kagan: I just go back to Justice Alito's question about the Social Security Administration. I'll put some scary sounding numbers on this. The SSA has been led by a single commissioner since 1994 and ever since then, it's rendered 650,000 decisions every year, so that's about 17 million decisions. Now you told Justice Alito, well, maybe there are some exceptions for lower-level employees. I'm not sure that ALJs would qualify as that, and even if they do, let's assume, which I think is probably true, that all of those decisions are rendered pursuant to guidance and rules that the SSA commissioner has enforced. So are we really going to void all of those decisions? ...  But, I mean, are you really making a good faith argument that if there were at --if there were for cause -- excuse me, if there were at will removal of the Social Security Administration that these 17 million decisions would come out differently or, indeed, that any of them would?

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