Articles Tagged with “Social Security Backlog”

The Social Security Administration is so overrun by pending claims that officials are unable to conduct adequate reviews of applications, compounding problems at the already beleaguered agency.

A report released recently by congressional investigators revealed to Georgia social security claims lawyers that officials at Social Security are frequently overworked, and often, award disability benefits without conducting a proper review of these claims. The investigators analyzed a total of 300 Social Security applications from Alabama, Oklahoma and Virginia. In all of these cases, persons were awarded disability benefits. However, in more than 25% of these cases, the benefits were awarded without taking the consideration the presence of insufficient or incomplete evidence.

The investigators found that in several of the cases that were analyzed, Social Security officials approved of the claim without the benefit of strong medical evidence to corroborate the finding. In other cases, investigators were not able to explain their medical basis for the decision adequately. In yet other cases, the judges were overworked trying to deal with the case backlog, and were simply not able to review all the pieces of evidence.