The combination of an aging workforce and a poor economy has led to a spike in recent years in the number of Social Security Disability claims. Numbers show that approximately 3.2 million citizens applied for benefits last year, which is a 25 percent increase from the previous decade.
This increase in the volume of claims has led to the Social Security program facing a new crisis of judges facing an inflated workload. The Social Security Administration has called for each judge to issue rulings on between 500 and 700 cases per year. An article from The Detroit News explains that a group of judges that have filed suit against the agency and its commissioner claiming that the goal is illegal and forces them to make hasty decisions.
Court documents point out that the paperwork for a claim approval is often only a few pages long, versus the roughly 15 to 20 pages of documentation that is needed for a denial. The judges claim that in order to keep up with their workload, they are forced to simply issue an approval because of the amount of time the paperwork would take.
Newlin Disability and their team of Social Security Disability Attorneys are hopeful that identifying this problem will help to create a more efficient means of processing Social Security disability claims in the future.
