If you have read various posts on this and other Social Security disability blogs, you will note that there has been a lot of discussion about the delays that plague the system. In the Atlanta hearing offices, for example, hearings are now just being scheduled for applications that extend back two or three years.
Social Security acknowledges the problems and contends that these delays are the result of personnel shortages and growing numbers of claimants.
Let me tell you about a different explanation – one that comes directly from the mouth of a sitting Social Security hearing judge.
I am not going to name this judge for obvious reasons, but I can tell you that he does not work out of the Atlanta hearing office – in fact, the hearing office where he works has a better than average wait time – in his office, hearings are usually scheduled within 9 or 10 months after the hearing is requested.
My case had actually taken a lot longer – my client had been waiting over 2 and 1/2 years. After the hearing, the judge explained why.
It seems that my case involved an unusual medical issue – one about which the judge was unfamiliar. As such, he had noted on the file that he wanted a medical expert to testify. In my experience, medical experts appear about 25% of the time when a judge needs help understanding the nature of a disease or condition, treatment options and the patient’s prognosis.
When a medical expert is called, someone in the hearing office has to coordinate the judge’s calendar, the claimant lawyer’s calendar, the medical expert’s calendar, and arrange for a vocational expert. Further, because medical experts are often hard to pin down, judges like to schedule 4 or 5 cases on the same day with the medical expert.
It turns out that the scheduling clerk in this particular hearing office decided that all this coordination and scheduling was too much trouble. The clerk gathered up all the cases that were marked as "needing medical expert testimony" and she hid them away in a file cabinet. The clerk’s deed was only uncovered when someone from the hearing office administrative staff noticed a spike in the "pending cases" statistics and started digging.
What we have, therefore, is a situation where a rogue or incompetant office clerk single handedly caused over a year’s delay in hundreds of serious disability cases. The judge said to me that he had been instructed to put his existing caseload on hold in order to process through the backlog as quickly as he could.
The judge also told me that he had no staff to help him – and he basically had no liason with attorneys to try to expedite the processing of these cases – in other words, if there was a situation where the judge might need an MRI report or other document, he had no way of communicating this need to the attorney prior to the hearing. (I did not ask, but I suspect that this judge did not feel comfortable with ex parte communications with claimant’s counsel or that he felt that such communications were support staff duties).
My case, in fact, was a second hearing – at the first hearing six months prior, the judge announced that he needed to ask a medical expert a few questions and the the "hearing" could be conducted by telephone, and that I could participate at my office. Instead, a hearing was scheduled, necessitating a multi-hour drive. When I got there, the judge apologized and said that he had not become aware of the mix up until the weekend before the hearing and had no way to get in touch with me. Although I ended up winning my case, I lost a good four hours that day driving back and forth for what amounted to a 10 minute conversation with the medical expert.
My point here – Social Security has a real mess on its hands and the solutions are not quite as simple as "adding more personnel." New and existing staff people need to have some idea what to do and efficient processing systems need to be put into place. Currently we are far from even minimal competence in these areas.