Social Security Administration: More ALJs are on the way to Buffalo

Daily Record (Rochester, NY), Jun 3, 2008 by Elizabeth Stull

The Social Security Administration (SSA) will finally assign its Buffalo office some new personnel to address lengthy processing delays.

Earlier this year the SSA announced the appointment of more than 130 new administrative law judges in fiscal 2008, including one attorney from Rochester, but none were designated for western New York.

The administration has been fighting lengthy processing delays in disability cases nationwide, but Buffalo's processing times at the hearing level rank in the lowest 20 percent in the country. The Buffalo office serves Erie, Chautauqua, Niagara, Genesee, Ontario, Monroe and Cattaraugus counties.

In a May 22 letter to Rep. Brian Higgins, D-27th, SSA Commissioner Michael Astrue confirmed that two new administrative law judges and additional personnel will be hired to expand the Rochester satellite of its Buffalo Hearing Office. Astrue noted that 40 percent of Buffalo's cases come from Rochester and there are "space limitations in Buffalo that will take some time to remedy."

Nevertheless, Astrue said the agency is recruiting two additional employees for the Buffalo hearing office, "to process post-hearing actions more quickly and prepare folders for the ALJs so that their dockets remain full."

"We expect that the upgrades to the Rochester office will allow us to serve Rochester residents where they live, thereby reducing the number of cases to be handled by the judges in the Buffalo HO," Astrue wrote.

The average time to process hearing requests in Western New York is 664 days, or about 22 months, John Shallman, regional spokesman for the Social Security Administration, noted in a recent e-mail. At the end of April, 11,802 hearing requests were pending.

At the beginning of the fiscal year, Buffalo had 4,926 cases that were pending for 900 days or more, according to Astrue's letter. The federal agency transferred 1,700 of them to hearing offices in Brooklyn and Manhattan that handle cases more quickly, Astrue wrote. As of May 9, the Buffalo Hearing Office had only 494 cases pending 900 days or more. All of those should be closed by the end of the year, the commissioner added.

Attorneys and advocates also attribute the Buffalo delays to inadequate staffing.

"The staff hasn't kept up with the demand," said Jeffrey Freedman, an attorney who has been handling social security disability appeals for 30 years. "My friend Judy [Katzenelson, hearing office director] is doing a nice job, but she only has so many people. Her hands are tied."

The office currently has about 70 employees, including 12 administrative law judges in the Buffalo hearing office and two in the Rochester satellite office.

Each administrative law judge has had an average of 895 pending cases, according to a March 2008 SSA report. About 47 percent of these cases have been pending for more than a year. The average age of all pending claims is 381 days.

In fiscal 2007, the agency identified more than 63,000 cases nationwide that were more than 1,000 days old, according to Commissioner Astrue's April 23 testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee.

Nationally the average processing time has nearly doubled in the past eight years, from 274 days in 2000 to an estimated 535 days for the current fiscal year, said Marty Ford, co-chairman of the Social Security Task Force Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities. Ford represented the National Organization of Social Security Claimants' Representatives (NOSSCR) and 20 other advocacy groups at the committee meeting.

U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, as well as Rep. Higgins, asked Astrue to explain the allocation process for new administrative law judges and how the assignments will help reduce the case backlog in New York. They urged the SSA to reconsider its allocation plan and hire more judges for offices with the biggest backlogs.

Attorney Brian Kane, formerly of the SSA's Office of Disability Adjudication Review in Rochester, was appointed in February to serve as an administrative law judge in Jackson, Miss. Kane and his wife, attorney June Castellano, a past president of the Monroe County Bar Association, have lived for many years with their two school-age daughters in Brighton. Kane and Castellano both declined to comment on the appointment.