Reduce the Hearings Backlog and Prevent its Recurrence

The timeliness and accuracy of SSA's disability decisions at the hearing adjudicative level is at the forefront of congressional and Agency concerns.

As of August 2011, SSA's hearings backlog was approximately 767,000 cases--about 66,000 cases higher than the backlog at the same time in Fiscal Year 2010. However, the situation with timeliness shows clearer improvement, with the cumulative average processing time dropping to 361 days in August 2011, compared to 429 days in August 2010.  

Since 2007, SSA has been implementing the Commissioner’s plan to eliminate the backlog of disability hearing requests and prevent its occurrence. The following reports illustrate our efforts to do this.