The wait times for disability hearings before an Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) have bordered on the ridiculous for quite some time. Regularly, it has taken Social Security between 12 and 15 months to schedule hearings nationwide, but rather than these wait times decreasing, they have only increased at most hearing locations. Social Security officials have expressed the need to cut down on wait times and now have a plan to do so. This plan, which was highlighted last month by Social Security, is called Compassionate and Responsive Service (CARES).
Social Security points out that it is facing an “unprecedented public service crisis with over one million people waiting for a hearing decision.”
At the guts of it, CARES is aimed at reducing wait times for hearings. The problem with Social Security’s launching of CARES is that there is no specific mention of how Social Security will attempt to streamline the hearing process. Social Security’s mentioning of CARES indicates that it will focus on “two essential components: people and quality.” The initiatives Social Security will launch are supposed to increase hearing adjudication and disposition, improve Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) support and staff efficiency and strengthen personnel oversight and policy compliance “without sacrificing” Social Security’s commitment to quality.
The only real tool Social Security indicates it will use to accomplish its CARES goal is through technology innovation. Any efforts to increase efficiency and to cut down on hearing wait times is applauded, but it would be more valuable to see exactly how Social Security is going to achieve this new strategy it has unveiled. In recent months we have only seen that hearing wait times are increasing, pretty much all across the country, so hopefully we will see improvement over the next few months.
