Commissioner Martin O’Malley’s decision to throw out federal labor market data, some of which was last updated 47 years ago, came after a December 2022 investigation by The Washington Post found that the outdated lists The Ministry of Employment prevented many beneficiaries who were unable to work from receiving vital monthly disability benefits.
“These are egregious examples of how we weren’t up to date,” O’Malley said in an interview. Relying on outdated duties “undermines confidence in the rest of the process” of applying for disability benefits.
Because many benefit decisions depend on whether claimants can still work, the occupation list was a key factor for administrative law judges considering appeals. “The industrial economy changes, jobs disappear. We weren’t removing them,” O’Malley said.
Lawyers and advocates said the changes would immediately improve an already difficult process.
“This is going to be a real problem for disability claimants,” said John F. Kennedy, a New Jersey disability lawyer who has written extensively about the Social Security Administration’s use of occupational data and worked with colleagues in recent months to They will submit proposals to O’Malley to change the system, such as removing outdated jobs from consideration.
“I can speak to the psychological impact it has on a disability claimant when they find out that their disability claim, which they’ve been waiting years for, has been denied because someone said they could do a job that doesn’t exist,” Liebkemann said.
Job listings The standard has been used for decades by the Social Security Administration as part of the process by which it evaluates disability benefit applicants’ ability to work. When reviewing a claim, officials must determine whether there are a “substantial number” of jobs available for the claimant that are still available.
The agency has been This assessment is based on a large collection of publications called the Occupational Dictionary. — But the database contains 12,700 entries for skilled and unskilled workers, many of which were last updated in 1977. The database appears on a high-risk list of government programs compiled by the Government Accountability Office, which highlights programs and operations at risk of waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement or in need of change.
The Labor Department, which originally created the index, discontinued it 33 years ago as a sign of the economy’s shift from blue-collar manufacturing to information services. But Social Security Administration occupational experts regularly listed some 137 unskilled, sedentary jobs, such as reptile breeder, bank pin adjuster and barrel assembler. Denying benefit claims. These roles were largely moved overseas or replaced by machines long ago.
In 2012, the Social Security Administration asked the Bureau of Labor Statistics to compile an updated list of occupations and their characteristics. The project cost about $300 million and continues to pay out $30 million annually. The data is publicly available, but the agency has not yet used it.
The Social Security Administration will eliminate 114 occupations from its old database on Monday. Going forward, the agency will no longer cite the following occupations: A log scaler or a clock repairman.
The currently excluded occupations are the ones most frequently cited as reasons for denial of benefits, but the Dictionary of Occupational Titles includes a total of 3,127 unskilled occupations, many of which are not sedentary. Disability advocates said the devices are likely to remain in use for the foreseeable future.
O’Malley also said Social Security won’t yet switch to a state-of-the-art system put together by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many advocates have called for, because more study is needed.
“That’s the direction we’re heading,” he said.
O’Malley said lawmakers, particularly Republicans, have been pressuring him to “find more cost-effective ways” to keep occupational screening at a “reasonable cost.” He couldn’t say when the new system, which will require a lengthy regulatory process and staff training, might begin to be used.
Job Data The program has long been a politically sensitive issue, with criticism that the government has been too generous, or not generous enough, in handing out benefits.
Disability advocates say switching to modern occupation lists would likely increase the approval rate of claims, but conservatives, including former Trump administration officials who unsuccessfully lobbied for disability programs to start using modern occupation lists, argue that many people with disabilities can do a variety of modern computer tasks and that more benefits will actually be denied.
Some advocates warned that the changes announced Monday are too incremental to fix a process that has long been broken.
“From merely an impressive profession [Dictionary of Occupational Titles] “It’s a political solution to a technical problem,” said David Weaver, a former Social Security administrator. Weaver said there are numerous cases pending in federal court where the Social Security Administration has “rejected thousands of disability applicants who work in occupations that it plans to eliminate.”
It was not immediately clear how the Social Security Administration would address such ongoing cases that relied on outdated employment data.
The bureau continued to face questions last week from Republican senators on the Senate Finance Committee about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ expensive new system.
“Social Security [use of outdated occupational data] “They need to be taken off the high-risk list,” Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, the Finance Committee’s top Republican, said during a hearing on work and disability benefits, referring to the GAO list. “Having access to the most up-to-date data will produce better outcomes for recipients and save money in the process.”
Fixes
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of outdated occupations that the Social Security Administration has removed from its Dictionary of Occupational Titles. 114 occupational titles have been removed. This article has been corrected.
