40,000 pending cases in Michigan

[dragonfly]

Friends,
Here is a link to a Detroit Free Press article that appeared today:

www.freep.com/article/201005200300/NEWS06/5200593

Michigan is 1 of 10 states that doesn't use the reconsideration procedure, and the article discusses why it might be useful to reinstitute reconsiderations in MI. After reconsideration, according to this article, it can take 2.5 years for an appeal to be processed.

So, if MI doesn't have reconsiderations, then the MI appeal process must take more than the national average?

D-fly

[71stretch]

Now I understand why judges in a Louisiana office are doing hearings for part of Michigan, as was mentioned in one of the other threads.

[nonamouse]

Dallas North office took Ann Arbor, MI as a new remote site last year I think and other offices are helping out by taking cases from the Rust Belt states or anywhere else they get behind even if they don't take one of the remote sites. For instance, I know another office has some Dayton, Ohio cases and more than one office was helping Nashville even before the flooding.

I don't know that the lack of recon is the problem. Michigan is simply in an area with high unemployment and whole industries are going under there. We get a number of cases in my office of former UAW auto workers who got laid off, early retirement or whatever in Michigan and then apply for disability and move to our region where we process hearings much faster. The best thing about going paperless on our cases is that we can shift the hearing load around fairly easily when one city or area gets swamped. In a bad economy it is the more marginal workers who lose jobs first and then have more trouble finding another, so many of them file for disability and increase our receipts. Michigan was hurting well before the economy slowed in the rest of the country, so they are the poster child for the back log now.

The senior attorneys have not had signature powers again for a sufficient amount of time to have a huge impact in Michigan, but I think that they are helping to reduce the wait time better than recon. Sr. attorneys can get permission for development and to request amended onset dates in a way that the state agency won't for recon. Therefore, a senior attorney working with the ALJs in his/her office is more likely to get the cases that only need a little work to be favorable out of our pipeline than the state agency people at recon. As the article noted, recon can be a rubber stamp of the initial with the quick turn around between the two that frequently does not allow sufficient time for any additional evidence to be submitted.