Applying for disability is a great hardship. The family has lost an income source, so money is tight. You want to work but are unable to do so due to a disabling condition. The disability application process becomes even more disheartening when you discover how long Social Security takes to process the claims. There are several reasons why Social Security Disability claims take so long:
- First, disability cases do not have deadlines.
- Second, all cases are different. A claimant’s impairments and medical evidence are unique. Some conditions are easy to classify as disabling, while others take longer.
- Third, it depends on who is reviewing your case. Sometimes, a case is assigned to a claims examiner or Administrative Law Judge who takes longer to process claims than others. In short, the time to process your case may come down to “the luck of the draw.”
- Fourth, your claim is taking so long because of the backlog of cases. There are so many open disability cases, it takes a long time for the SSA to process all of the claims.
The SSA Backlog
Over the last five years, Social Security’s disability workloads have grown significantly due in part to baby boomers reaching their disability-prone years and an economic downturn with high unemployment. Since Fiscal Year (“FY”) 2007, initial disability claim receipts have increased by nearly 30 percent. In FY 2011, Social Security received nearly 3.3 million initial disability applications, over 30,000 more than Social Security received in FY 2010. Social Security anticipates receiving nearly 3.3 million applications in FY 2012 and over 3.1 million in FY 2013.
Consequently, the number of appeals has also grown, which means the time to process the appeals has grown. In FY 2011, Social Security received a record number of requests for a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge – nearly 860,000 requests, which is 20 percent more than it received in FY 2010. In FY 2007, almost half of all claimants who requested hearings had waited more than 270 days for a hearing decision, and some waited up to 1,400 days. At the end of FY 2011, 29 percent of hearing requests were over 270 days old, and virtually no cases were over 775 days old.
At the end of FY 2008, the average wait for a hearing decision peaked at nearly 18 months. Since that time, Social Security has steadily reduced the wait. In FY 2011, Social Security cut the average wait to below one year for the first time since 2003. However, this year-long wait is not calculated from when the claimant filed the initial application. It is calculated from the time the Request for Hearing was filed, which is typically from 3 to 6 months after the application was originally filed. That means the average wait from the initial application to a hearing before a judge is still approximately 1.5 to 2 years!
I am not telling you this to discourage you but to let you know that the delay is due to the incredibly large number of applicants and the huge backlog of pending Social Security cases. 3.1 million claims are a lot of claims to process.