Indianapolis ODAR Transferring Disability Cases Due to SSA Backlog
The Indianapolis ODAR is again transferring disability cases to other offices. We just got a batch of notices for several cases. The notices state that the case will still be heard in Indianapolis, but that it will be assigned to another judge in another office. We now have clients with their cases in Illinois and Arizona. Read more
Congressional Subcommittee to Hold Hearings on SSA Backlog
Congressman Michael R. McNulty (D-NY), Chairman, Subcommittee on Social Security of the Committee on Ways and Means, announced that the Subcommittee will hold a hearing on the performance of the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) appeals hearing offices on Tuesday, September 16, 2008 Read more
Indianapolis ODAR Average Processing Time
According to a recently released report from SSA, as of June 27, 2008, the Average Processing Time at the Indianapolis Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (“ODAR”) is 896 days. By this ranking, Indianapolis was in 147th place out of 147th ODARs. The Evansville ODAR was at 136th place with 762 days. Fort Wayne was at 130th place with 711 days.
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!
SGA – Substantial Gainful Activity- Presumptive Amounts
At Step One of the Five Step Sequential Analysis , Social Security determines if you are engaged in Substantial Gainful Activity (SGA). When you work for someone else and are not self-employed, SSA usually uses a “rule of thumb” to determine if someone is engaged in SGA. According to this “rule of thumb” if you earn a certain dollar amount or less, you are usually not considered to be engaged in Substantial Gainful Activity. Read more
Five Step Sequential Evaluation
Social Security uses a 5 step sequential evaluation process to decide your claim. Read more
Celebrate Our Liberty and Rights
I hope you have a fun and safe Fourth of July. It is a great time to celebrate our liberty and rights. The holiday is known as Independence Day because our forefathers had to fight for our liberty and rights. The government of that time (British) did not want to recognize the rights that we were claiming. It was only by our forefathers fighting hard and not giving up that we have our rights today.
No one man could do it by himself. Read more
When Should I Hire An Attorney For My Disability Case?
I recently was the moderator of a panel discussion at the Indiana Continuing Legal Education Forum Social Security disability seminar “Persuasion at Social Security Hearings: Beyond the Mechanics at ODAR Hearings”. During another part of the seminar, an attorney was asked when he would begin representing clients in their Social Security Claim. He responded that he would not represent a claimant until they had been turned down at least once. I used to do it that way.
When I first started representing claimants in 1994, I also would not take a client until they had been turned down at least once. I reasoned that if someone could be approved on their initial application without an attorney, why not let them go ahead on their own and find out if their claim could be approved. They could save an attorney fee and it would not hurt their case if they did lose, so why not wait to see who really needed an attorney to help them?
But then I started to notice something. When people applied by themselves, they were making it harder to win their case by not having an attorney at the beginning to explain to them the rules of Social Security. They were unknowingly lowering the odds for success at that stage and at the appeal stages. They were not realizing that they were making strategic decisions that might ruin their claim before some administrative law judges. They did not have someone to help them figure out what was the relevant evidence that they needed to be sure they presented to Social Security. I figured out that I was wrong-people were hurting their case by not having an attorney at the beginning of their case.
Several years ago I decided that I had to start taking claimants as clients as soon as possible. Claimants needed to be represented before they filed their claim. If I made a claimant wait until they were turned down before I would represent them, their not knowing the rules put them at a disadvantage: bad evidence was created, good evidence was not brought forward, other strategic choices were being made that could not be undone, and good claims were being unnecessarily tainted with misinformation.
Do not wait to hire an attorney. Get competent help before you file so that the job will be done correctly from the beginning. Do not hope that the attorney can tear out the bad and re-do it. Do it right the first time. It can shorten the whole disability process. Get an attorney that will represent you from the beginning of your claim. Have someone on your side that knows the rules of Social Security and can explain them to you.
Why Does It Take Social Security So Long To Decide a Disability Case?
Clients always want to know why it takes so long to decide a Social Security disability case. The dirty little secret is that Social Security does not have enough staff to quickly handle the case. How do we know this?
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.
