Social Security has released its strategic plan for fiscal years 2018 to 2022. The document, which you can find here, is 19 pages long, but one of the main topics, and focuses of the plan, is to deliver more services effectively and to improve the delivery of services.
There is no doubt this should be Social Security’s main goal. The plan points out that there are more than 1 million people nationwide who are waiting an average of more than 600 days for their disability hearing request to be scheduled. The plan states that “these wait times remain unacceptable. Therefore, one of our top priorities will be to reduce the hearings backlog and the time it takes to get a hearing decision.”
According to the strategic plan, one of the major obstacles to reducing the backlog of disability claimants is Social Security’s processing centers. After a medical determination is made, the processing centers are enlisted to support Social Security’s field office staff and hearing office staff to process appeal decisions, collect debt, correct records and process other complex benefit claims. This is supposed to be a resource that is going to reduce some of the workload of field office and hearing office staff. Unfortunately, this has yet to work, as wait times continue to increase, so we have to look at where Social Security intends to improve over the next four years.
The Strategies
- Advance and update Compassionate And Responsive Service (CARES) plan to address the number of pending hearing decisions and lengthy wait times
- Implement a comprehensive approach to reduce the number of pending PC actions
- Increase the use on online services.
We are in just the infant stages of Social Security’s four-year strategic plan, hopefully these initiatives reduce the historical wait times claimants are now facing.
