The Social Security disability backlog of people who are waiting for hearings is at an unprecedented level. There are now more than 1.1 million people who are waiting for hearings and nearly every hearing’s office across the country has wait times of more than a year’s wait for a hearing to be held. The Office of the Inspector General for the Social Security Administration recently released a report of the OIG’s audit that looked, in part, at the agencies attempts to reduce this backlog.
Back in January of this year the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) launched its CARES plan, which identified 21 initiatives to address the backlog problem. The program’s goal is to reduce processing times for hearings to 270 days by 2020, a goal that seems like a million miles away right now.
In May of this year the OIG confirmed that the average processing time for hearing cases was 526 days, which makes it seem unlikely that the average processing time could be reduced by nearly 50 percent in a little less than four years.
The CARES plan does not seem to be working and the OIG even admitted that 13 of the 21 initiatives identified in the program were already ideas Social Security has previously been using to try and reduce the backlog, but the backlog is only getting worse.
The OIG’s audit is useful only to show that plans to reduce the backlog are not working. We have head rumblings about Social Security budget reductions that could result in a certain number of furloughs for Social Security employees and even more Social Security offices closing up operation. These real possibilities have not even been implemented yet so one is left to wonder how in the world Social Security can reduce backlogs with reduced staff and resources when things are already going in the wrong direction. To check out the OIG’s full report click here.
