Disability judges cite pressure to resolve Social Security cases

WASHINGTON — Current and former judges in the Social Security disability system told a House subcommittee on Thursday that they were pushed to resolve cases as fast as they could rather than examine the evidence thoroughly.

J.E. Sullivan, who spent three years as an administrative law judge for Social Security disability cases, said she was told to hold hearings on cases without medical evidence and look for reasons to award disability payments. There was “tremendous pressure” to meet quotas for resolving cases in the system, which has been plagued by backlogs, Sullivan said.

Larry J. Butler, a Social Security administrative law judge in Florida, said the Social Security Administration has focused exclusively in the past six years on reducing the backlog, to the exclusion of all other considerations, including correctly applying the law and following up on whether people collecting the benefits are still too disabled to work.

Rep. James Lankford, ROklahoma City, chairman of the Energy Policy, Health Care and Entitlements subcommittee, said the disability program’s growth has exploded in recent years and is predicted to be insolvent in three years.

About 11 million people, including disabled workers, spouses and children, receive Social Security disability benefits, up from about 8 million only a decade ago. One former judge said Thursday that the program for some has become a substitute for unemployment benefits.

The Social Security Administration has failed to recognize the problems, Lankford said, both with the process for awarding benefits and then determining whether people should continue getting benefits.

“Some reforms to correct the broken disability determination process will need congressional action, but there are many steps the agency can unilaterally take to better protect American tax dollars and those most in need — the truly disabled — who will suffer the most from a continuation of the excessive growth in disability claimants,” Lankford said.

Glenn Sklar, deputy commissioner at the Social Security Administration, said the agency has given judges a goal of issuing 500 to 700 decisions a year but that it wasn’t a quota or a mandate.

Last year, he said, 78 percent of the judges met the expectation. Sklar said the agency also had been able to greatly reduce the backlog of cases improving the oversight of judges, though he noted that the administration has no authority to fire or suspend judges.

Witnesses said the system has evolved to the point that most people claiming disability are represented by attorneys. A chief criticism of the process is that it’s not adversarial — there’s no one arguing against the person’s claim. The claims only go to the judges after they’ve been denied at a lower level.

Few people awarded disability benefits ever leave the system. Sklar said it would require $1.2 billion to hire enough staff to perform the necessary reviews to determine whether people still qualified for the benefits.