Ranking Protocols for Hearing Offices

The Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) has been helping the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) develop ranking protocols for SSA Hearing Offices based on Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) performance.

The OIG began by conducting a pilot study of hearing office performace based on 5 markers (“risk factors”) of Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) performance. The 5 risk factors the OIG used were: ALJ dispositions, ALJ on-the-record (OTR) decision numbers, ALJ allowance rates, ALJ processing times (average), and ALJ dismissal numbers.

The OIG then asked the SSA to decide if the methodology of the study and the results it yielded would be worth developing further as an official means of monitoring hearing office performance, and to make sure that ODAR’s existing monitoring protocols focus on the relationship between ALJ OTR numbers and case rotation as a means of identifying potential fraud.

The SSA will use the OIG’s study, as well as a variety of other methods to continue to improve its anti-fraud monitoring protocols.