Author: Cheryl Coon
Recently, I was asked whether I agreed with a General Accounting Office (GAO) report, prepared at the request of a congressional subcommittee, that seemed to indicate that Social Security judges nationwide have been too lenient in their awards, and that they have improperly awarded almost 25,000 cases, costing taxpayers $2 billion over the last seven years.
Since this is so contrary to my own experience, I thought I would share my response:
I wish the purpose and scope of the GAO report had been to survey overall what’s happening.
But the request was very limited — to identify ALJs with 700 or more decisions AND who approved more than 85% of claimants who came before them. In other words, GAO did not study any ALJS with moderate or low approval rates, nor did they review ALJ decisions as a whole. They studied ONLY the highest approvers.
You can’t prove much at all by looking only at those who approve 85%!
As GAO says in its conclusions on p. 12 – they found that 38 out of 275 cases were incorrectly approved. They then extrapolated that to all allowances by “outlier ALJs” to conclude $2 billion in payments that weren’t supported by the record.
So we have (1) a very small actual sample; (2) extrapolated only to other similar judges’ decisions, ie., high approver ALJ decisions. Even if that’s accurate, it doesn’t say a word about (1) the cost to the system of wrongfully denied cases that then are approved at the federal court level, costing millions or more in personnel time; (2) the cost to the lives and health of millions of wrongfully denied – or simply delayed – claimants.