Shapiro v. Social Security Administration -- ALJ firing upheld

The Federal Circuit upheld the firing of an Administrative Law Judge for failing to meet productivity requirements.  The case is important because it documents the expectation of the Social Security Administration and the constraints that this puts on claimants seeking benefits.

In 2007, the Chief ALJ told the ALJ corps that the agency expected between 500 and 700 legally sufficient decisions each year.  So let's do the math.  An ALJ has to review the file, conduct the hearing, and give instructions to someone else to write the decision.  The ALJ has to review the decision and sign it.  We can assume that an ALJ takes about five weeks vacation per year and actually sits on the bench only every other week.  We also have holidays to address as well.  That brings us down to perhaps 23 weeks of hearings per year.

If the ALJ hears 20 cases per week, that ALJ will fall short of the productivity goal of 500 dispositions per year.  If the ALJ hears 30 cases per week, the ALJ will almost meet the upper edge of the disposition expectation announced in October 2007.  Assuming 24 hearings in a week and having hearings on four of the five weekdays, the ALJ must have six hearings per day.  That's at best an hour per hearing four days a week, 23 weeks per year to get into the range.

Some cases have relatively simple dispositions.  The ALJ calls a medical expert who testifies that the claimant meets or equals a listed impairment or has a residual functional capacity that calls for application of a favorable grid rule and the case is over in about 15 minutes.  But this does not address the cases on the bubble.

The case on the bubble requires full examination of any medical expert called by the ALJ, full examination of the claimant for benefits including a document by document explanation of any conflict that the ALJ might have perceived in terms of activities of daily living, adequacy of medical treatment, and other reasons that the ALJ might articulate later in an unfavorable decision.  The ALJ will likely have called a vocational expert to testify at the hearing.  That witness will lack any degree or training in statistical analysis and therefore have to make up numbers about the incidence of jobs in the national economy.

Realistically, a full-blown hearing for a case in the bubble where the person has an arguable disability would require a four hour process.  No consistency exists from vocational expert to vocational expert and little consistency exists from ALJ to ALJ.  Can an ALJ have that lengthy of a hearing for any one single case?  In firing ALJ Shapiro, SSA has responded that an ALJ that regularly permits a full due process hearing will likely end up on the short end of the stick.  The agency expects the ALJ to manage the docket and dispose of the cases in the same period of time as the rest of the corps.  An ALJ that wants to provide due process in an administrative hearing on a regular and continuing basis for the half of cases that require that degree of inquiry will never meet the productivity expectations of the agency and find themselves in a disciplinary proceeding.