Wasteful and fraudulent disability payments are well-documented problems, but a congressional probe has found that they often result when administrative law judges in the federal bureaucracy approve previously rejected claims.
The Social Security Administration discovered deficiencies in appeals decisions from every ALJ it has reviewed since 2011, according to a report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
All 48 of the individual reviews found the ALJs wrongly evaluated applicants’ ability to work and discounted drug addiction or alcoholism, among other missteps.
Congressional investigators built on a June 2014 report that conducted three case studies of ALJs who “rubber-stamped” almost every appeal they evaluated. By granting disability benefits to just 100 people who aren’t actually disabled, the trio added $30 million to the federal budget.
The 1,400 judges who handled disability appeals handed out benefits to more than 3.2 million people between 2005 and 2013, granting the requests of more than half of all applicants at a cost of nearly $1 trillion.
What’s more, investigators discovered 191 judges had approved 85 percent or more of the appealed applications that came across their desks.
The only way SSA gauged the performance of the judges was by adding up the number of cases a judge oversaw in a given time period, according to May 2013 testimony by Frank Cristaudo, a former chief administrative law judge.
Another top judge testified in October 2013 that granting more than 75 or 80 percent of appeals should raise a “red flag” about the reliability of those decisions.
But awarding benefits takes “significantly less time” than denying them, the report said.
The probe uncovered a 2012 internal review in which SSA found that the more cases judges had to decide, the less reliable their decisions were. That review found the overall accuracy of appeals decisions began to fall once judges ruled on 600 or more cases a year.
Even so, SSA allowed dozens of judges to decide more than 1,000 cases every year, the report said.
Without conducting any research into how long appeals decisions should actually take, Cristaudo enforced policies that compelled judges to process between 500 and 700 cases every year, the report said.
SSA allowed “overwhelming evidence of incompetence” among its judges to continue by focusing solely on pushing as many cases as possible through the system, regardless of whether they were handled correctly, the report concluded.
Go here to read the committee’s full report.
