When I chaired an Indiana Continuing Legal Education Forum  seminar on Social Security in 2006, I invited judges from the Indianapolis and Fort Wayne offices of the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR), to speak to the attorneys. (ODAR used to be called the Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA).) While talking about the long delays before hearings are able to take place in the Indianapolis office, one judge commented on the staff shortages in the Indianapolis office. He told the attorneys that a judge in the Indianapolis ODAR was the highest paid mail clerk in the federal government due to the fact that there was not sufficient office staff to open the mail and associate it with the files. He stated that this judge therefore took the better part of one day a week to deal with the mail so that the cases could keep moving. That means that approximately 20% of this judge’s work time,  he was not able do what only he can do – be a judge- and instead is a mail clerk. No wonder things were moving slowly!!

The good news is that the Commissioner of Social Security has stated that he has lifted the hiring freeze in the hearing offices. In his testimony to the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives on February 28, 2008, he testified that he wants to have 4.1 support employees for each judge.

According to the statement of Linda S. McMahon, Deputy Commissioner for Operations, Social Security Administration, in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on May 8, 2008, until this year, Congress had not appropriated at or above the President’s budget request since 1993. Administrative funding was reduced or delayed in each of the prior 15 years. In the last 4 years alone, overall Agency employment dropped from 63,596 to 60,206.

For a long time, SSA has had a policy that it would not replace workers it lost due employees quiting, being fired, or retirement in the District Offices and Field Offices until it had lost two workers. Once the local office had lost two workers, then it would replace the two workers with only one new employee.

Along with their responsibility for many core Social Security workloads, field offices handle complex programs for other agencies, such as Medicare, Medicaid, e-Verify, Black Lung, Railroad Retirement, and food stamps. SSA also issues 1099s to help taxpayers file for payments under the economic stimulus package. Seems like the list of things that the local offices must do just keeps getting longer while the number of workers has gotten smaller. As a claim must be handled several times by the local office at each stage of your claim, one can begin to understand why the number of workers available to do the jobs that SSA does is important.

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