Elimination of the Hearing Backlog - An Update

Jason Cook
August 2008

Back in May of 2007, the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Michael Astrue, testified before Congress that he had developed a plan to not only eliminate the backlog on hearing requests, but to prevent its reoccurrence in the future. Improving hearing office procedure and increasing adjudicatory capacity were key components to this plan. Careful examination of some telling statistics reveals that, so far, the Commissioner's plan is a success.

One of the first orders of business for the hearings offices was to eliminate the backlog of "aged" cases, which were defined as cases that had been awaiting a hearing for at least 1000 days. By the end of the 2007 fiscal year, the number of aged cases was reduced from 63,770 to just 108. This year, the definition of aged cases was redefined to mean cases that had been waiting for a hearing for at least 900 days. As of March 28, 2008, there were just over 50,000 cases in this category - down from 135, 160 at the start of the year. The hearing offices are on target to completely eliminate this backlog by the end of September.

The second component in the plan, increasing adjudicatory capacity, is also of vital importance. In order to ensure that a similar backlog does not happen again in the future, hearing offices must be prepared to process the ever growing number of requests for hearings, as well as the inevitable loss of experiences administrative law judges. Filling ALJ dockets to capacity (i.e. maximizing the number of cases heard on a day-to-day basis) is the simplest way to prevent a backlog in the future.

To that end, hearing offices have simplified the preparation of "paper" files. By eliminating some of the more technical requirements in the preparation, files are ready to go to hearing sooner. In a six-month period ending on March 28, 2008, over 17,000 cases were identified as being prepared in this new, streamlined process.

Furthermore, DCO (Deputy Commissioner of Operations) employees have been working overtime to assist the various hearing offices in preparing cases to go to hearing. In the same six-month period, DCO employees logged more than 29,000 hours of overtime. It is highly unlikely that the aged case backlog would have been eliminated without this commitment.

Disability Determination Services (DDS) has also assisted in this initiative by reopening certain cases based on scoring profiles created by the Office of Quality Performance (OQP). DDS agreed to reopen approximately 20,000 informal remands in 2007, with approximately 8,700 favorable decisions rendered. DDS has agreed to review approximately 51,000 cases in 2008, and expected that about 10% of those cases would have their previous denials reversed. Thus far, however, DDS has exceeded expectations and has reversed almost 35% of their previous denials.

Finally, SSA has commenced new ALJ hirings. ODAR (Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, a sub branch of SSA) has already gone through the interview process and made selections, including 133 new acceptances. ODAR anticipates hiring another 40 ALJs this year, which would push the number of new judges this year to 175. Of course, more Judges mean that more cases will go for a hearing on a daily basis.

Thus it seems apparent that the Commissioner's plan has achieved even better results than previously hoped for. With the continued efforts of all those involved, the prospects look bright that claimants will receive a quicker adjudication of their claim than could even have been imagined just a few years ago.