The bad news is that the wait is still over two years long from the Request for Hearing. It is important that you keep seeing your doctor during your long wait so that your medical condition will be documented.

I recently posted that Indianapolis had dropped from 144th place out of 147 to 147th out of 147 (now the worst in the nation) with an average processing time of 896 days from the time of the filing of the Request for Hearing. Yesterday I posted on the Congressional Subcommittee that will be holding hearings to examine SSA’s management of its hearing offices and to explore measures that can be taken to improve productivity.

The hope is that by transferring cases from an Indianapolis judge to a judge in another office that  the cases will be heard sooner than if they stayed here with our Indianapolis Judges. Time will tell if this is how things really work out. There have been times in the past where cases where transferred out to other judges and by the time the case was heard and decided, no time was really saved.

Also, out of town judges are not familiar with our local physicians and hospitals and the way they do things. This can sometimes make a difference in how the out of town judge views the medical care that a claimant receives or the medical evidence. For example, if Doctor X is recognized in the local community as being THE expert on heart conditions to which all other doctors defer and the judge does not know this, the judge might not give as much importance to Doctor X’s opinion as he/she otherwise would if the Judge lived here and knew about Doctor X. In some cases, this could be very important.

The notice is not clear if the judge will actually travel here to Indianapolis or if the Judge will do the hearing by Video. Unless SSA has made improvements to the video equipment that it used in the past, I can not recommend video hearings. I had one client that was desperate for a hearing and the medical evidence was very, very strong. She could not wait any longer and we did a video hearing. The quality of the picture was so poor that if I had to pick out of a line up the judge that conducted the hearing, I would have to guess as I could not clearly see her features. I have been told that the more technically inclined judges can figure out how to control the camera at their end and adjust the focus and can zoom in to see the cliamant—I just have no way of knowing if that judge I have never seen before has the technical expertise to adjust the equipment so that the judge can really see my client. The picture is not “high definition TV” quality. I was not impressed. Some attorneys love it.

Indianapolis still needs more judges and support staff. Hopefully SSA can find the money to hire both for our Indianapolis hearing office. All of our Indianapolis hearing office employees are working as hard as they can. Hopefully this transferring of cases will benefit the claimants by causing their hearings to be heard sooner than if the case was left with our judges.

According to the background material in the announcement, the average processing time from the time that the Request for Hearing is filed is now 532 days. As I recently noted, the Indianapolis Office of Disability Adjudication and Review has an average processing time of 896 days and Indianapolis is ranked 147^th out of 147 hearing offices.

The background material confirms what I previously posted: years of too little money to hire support staff have caused us to end up where we are today. If you do not have enough workers to do the work, it will just pile up and take longer and longer to get it done.

In announcing the hearing, Chairman McNulty said, “Earlier hearings have demonstrated that prolonged underfunding has resulted in the loss of staff needed to process disability cases at the Social Security Administration.  This has led to an unprecedented backlog of unprocessed claims and untold suffering.  The agency must have the resources it needs to eliminate this unconscionable backlog.  At the same time, we must ensure that SSA uses these resources as effectively as possible.  This hearing will examine SSA’s management of its hearing offices, and explore measures that can be taken to improve productivity without compromising the right of claimants to a fair and impartial decision on their case.”

The announcement notes that concerns have been expressed that the agency’s plans for hiring support staff are not sufficient to address the large hearings backlog, that planned automation improvements will not meet expectations, and that an overemphasis on speed could degrade quality or compromise program integrity.

In a previous report, as of May 30, 2008, Indianapolis was in 144th place with average processing time of 815 days, Evansville was 135th place with average processing time of 704 days, and Fort Wayne was 122nd place with average processing time of 638 days.

Why is there such a delay at the hearing offices? Click Here!

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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