When you are awarded Social Security disability benefits, you do not receive benefits beginning on your onset date (which is the date you became disabled, and were not working). Rather, there is a 5-month “waiting period” before benefits accrue.
As a practical matter, however, it is often a 6-month waiting period. This is because the
New evidence for Social Security claims must be submitted 5 business days ahead of the hearing. See 20 CFR 404.935(a) and HALLEX I-2-5-13. With a typical weekend, that’s 7 days ahead of the hearing. Holidays, which are of course not business days, must be accounted for as well. So beware the 3-day holiday weekend
My first post on this blog was 15 years ago today! It is hard to believe that 15 years have gone by. Both personally and professionally, much has changed since I began.
Personally, I was newly married when I started the blog. We had just bought a house. We now have a 13 year old
At the recent NOSSCR Conference, I attended an excellent presentation by Ohio disability attorney Scott F. Smith on winning cases for Social Security disability. One of the topics covered was a pre-hearing brief for the administrative law judge. Mr. Smith listed several goals accomplished by writing a brief:
Drafting a brief is an endeavor that
At the close of a hearing, sometimes post-hearing argument is needed. Social Security’s rules allow for oral and/or written post-hearing argument, upon request. See HALLEX section I-2-6-76.
I prefer to submit a post-hearing brief, rather than make a statement at the close of the hearing. I think a brief has far more impact.
The annual NOSSCR conference will be in Washington, DC next week, beginning Wednesday, May 3rd. I am a sustaining member of NOSSCR, and will be there.
The NOSSCR conference is always a good chance to learn, and to get perspectives from others around the country who also specialize in Social Security disability law.
Please say
Most disability claims are decided on a medical-vocational basis. Sometimes too little attention is paid to the vocational part of the analysis.
At Social Security disability hearings, the administrative law judge will typically give the DDS residual functional capacity assessment as the initial hypothetical question to the vocational expert (VE) at the hearing. I have
There is an organization within Social Security called the Quality Review Board, also known internally as the Disability Quality Branch (DQB). The DQB samples initial and reconsideration determinations from state DDS agencies to ensure that Social Security’s disability rules and regulations are being interpreted and implemented properly by the various state DDS agencies – a
At Step 4 of Social Security’s sequential evaluation, the SSA considers the claimant’s ability to perform their past relevant work, both as actually performed and as generally performed in the national economy. That means that Social Security will evaluate your ability to do the jobs you have had over the past 15 years, both as described in your work history report and as generally performed.
If the job you had as a cashier was more demanding physically than that job is generally, and you could perform the job as generally performed, you will not be awarded disability benefits. On the face of it, this is a fair rule. But in practice, problems arise.
The first problem is that, to determine how a particular job is generally performed, Social Security refers to the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), a Department of Labor publication that hasn’t been updated since 1991 (and many jobs in the DOT date back to the 1970’s). So the description of a job’s requirements may be woefully outdated. I had this issue at a hearing recently, where an office-type job description in the DOT dated back to before there were PCs in the office, and before the internet. The job today is all about working on a computer and keyboarding, in a way the job wasn’t performed 30+ years ago. It took a lot of cajoling to get the vocational expert at the hearing to acknowledge that the job had evolved over time from its DOT description, and now required extensive use of the hands (which was a problem for my 63-year old client with severe psoriatic arthritis).
The disparity between the reality in the workplace and the dated job desciptions in DOT continues to grow with time. The issue has started to garner some media attention because of its unfairness. Claims are being denied using outdated vocational information.
Another problem is that a disability examiner at DDS may select a job title in the Dictionary of Occupational TItles that has the same name as the job performed by the claimant, but is a actually a different job.
I frequently talk with prospective clients who are thinking about applying for Social Security disability but are still working (and earning more than the 2023 SGA amount of $1,470 per month, gross pay).
These prospective clients sometimes want to discuss the likelihood of success for a disability claim, should they stop working and apply for