It is a consistent story across carriers and across the country, Social Security disability awards are down, but it isn’t really awards, it is decisions. Basically Social Security is just not making decisions, so the awards are still there, but they are taking longer to be adjudicated. Social Security national statistics support this as well as our own data. Nationally over the past year initial applications are down 11.5% while initial pending is up 26.5% and at the reconsideration level, filings are down 13.7% and yet reconsideration pending is up 49.4%. Between September 2019 and April 2021 the initial disability claim backlog has increased by approximately 115,000 claims.
What has caused this delay in decision-making? Social Security was relatively quick to transition to a fully remote workforce, but given the nature of the work, administrative duties and telephone calls increased exponentially and they just were not prepared to handle it. The following is an excerpt from the April 29th Senate Finance Committee hearing that illustrates some of the issues.
.. Limiting visitors has also resulted in an influx of incoming mail and phone calls. To illustrate the magnitude of this increase, before the pandemic, field offices scanned and uploaded about 150,000 paper documents weekly for processing. Offices are currently scanning and uploading approximately one and a half million paper documents weekly. In FY 2020, the unit time for the 47 million field office actions increased by 20 percent in part due to scanning, copying, indexing, and returning mailed documents, which significantly reduced our productivity. …
Similarly, field offices are now handling three times as many phone calls as they did pre-pandemic. We are on track to answer over 60 million calls in our field offices in FY 2021—up from 20 million calls handled in FY 2019. …
The Social Security Administration budget has authorized the hiring of 1300 (above attrition) Disability Determination Services employees to address the backlog at the initial and reconsideration levels, and the anticipated spike in claims due to the extended unemployment benefits ending in September 2021. They have also recently reinstated overtime which will help in processing some of the delayed decisions. Social Security has acknowledged the backlog will continue to grow as they manage the expected influx of claims, and reducing it to pre-Covid numbers will be a multi-year effort.