Articles from prior issues of The Advocate

January/February, 1996

Adjudication Officer Task Team

April 14, 1995

Mr. Chuck Jones
Director Disability Process Redesign
440 Altmeyer Building
Baltimore, MD

Dear Mr. Jones,

NADE would like to compliment you, Richard Fussell and the Adjudication Officer Task Team on their excellent, thoughtful report.

As you, Dr. Chater and the Partnership Council consider this report, there are a few issues we would like for you to consider.

Qualifications

We feel the team did an excellent job with the AO qualifications. There are thousands of excellently trained, experienced personnel, both federal and state employees who currently work in the disability arena. SSA should be able to use their talents to a maximum in the AO process. This will be a necessity if this process is to work as expected. As the team has proposed, this professionally qualified decision maker will hopefully have a positive impact in the Disability Program.

As proposed the AO position is a federal job position. While we understand the necessity of this posting, we urge you to further consider using the resources available in the DDSs to help implement this process. NADE is most interested in participating in this program to reduce the current backlog of cases pending. We can continue to be of valuable service to SSA if given the opportunity. Time Frame

We are concerned that the public will be misled by the proposed 45 day processing time goal. While we may understand that the proposed time frame assumes other parts of the redesign to be in place, this is being implemented in the present climate. It will not lead to public confidence to promise something which cannot be delivered under the current system.

Under the current system, those cases which require medical development cannot be done in 45 days without cooperation from hospitals and attending physicians. This is highly unlikely to happen in the near future.

Another problem is that ALJs continue to complain that DDSs do not obtain a lot of information that ALJs deem important such as opinion evidence. Since the AO is preparing cases for ALJs then it follows that nearly every case will require some further development to meet ALJ requirements. This will involve further development of many more than the proposed 20% of cases and will impact negatively on proposed time frames. Review Standard

Under the team proposal the AO will be held to the same quality standard as the ALJ. While NADE applauds this attempt to bring all the partners in the disability process closer together in their decision making standards, we feel that SSA must make a stand and do an intensive review of as many of these award decisions as possible. We assume the SSA Hearings offices will offer an assessment of quality on those cases forwarded to them. The solvency of the SSA Trust Funds and the General Fund for SSI are truly an issue here. SSA cannot afford to lose control over the quality of these decisions if they are to retain the public confidence.

We also feel that we need to reiterate our suggestion and belief that the standard of review must be made the same for all adjudication levels, including the DDSs. Even in the short term, before redesign is completely implemented, this change could have an outstanding effect on public confidence and the goal of giving the claimant a timely, correct decision earlier in the process.

Sincerely,

Larry DeVantier and Ellen Cook as Directed by the NADE Board