By Diane Stafford, Kansas City Star, April 06, 2010
An applicant seeking a Social Security disability benefits hearing in Kansas City waits an average of 582 days, according to a study to be released today.
Allsup Inc., a company that represents applicants in their efforts to obtain disability benefits, analyzed government data to produce the backlog report.
It found the average wait for a hearing before an administrative law judge was 498 days in Missouri, the eighth longest time among the states.
Earlier this year, Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, asked the Social Security Administration’s inspector general to study whether the agency was allocating sufficient resources to tackle the backlog.
The average wait for a hearing, a requirement for many applicants to receive benefits, was pegged at 399 days in Kansas.
The Kansas City office, which also receives cases from eastern Kansas, had a bigger backlog than the other hearing offices in Missouri and Kansas, according to Allsup’s report.
The national review is accessible online at www.allsup.com.
"Nationwide, nearly 700,000 Americans are waiting an average of 14½ months to receive hearings," Allsup officials said, noting that this was an improvement from two years ago.
Jim Allsup, the service company’s chief executive officer, said the Social Security Administration “should be commended” for attacking the hearings backlog in 2009.
The backlog has been reduced by about 71,000 cases since December 2008, Allsup said.
More than 2.8 million people nationwide filed applications for disability benefits last year, and 3.3 million claims are expected this year.
The recession helped to push more out-of-work Americans to file for disability benefits. From 2004 through 2007, disability applications were fairly constant at 2.1 million to 2.2 million per year.
To reach Diane Stafford, call 816-234-4359 or send e-mail to stafford@kcstar.com.