SSD Disability: How Useful is Calling Social Security about your Disability Claim?

If you have filed a claim for Social Security disability or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability, your claim has been sent to a state disability agency for a medical decision. Or, perhaps I should say that your disability claim should have been sent to the state disability agency on the day of your interview or the next day if you provided all of your information including signed medical release forms at the time of your disability interview.

Unfortunately, this is not always the situation, as Social Security claims representatives are dealing with an unprecedented number of disability claims, which can lead to delays.

Should you call to check on your disability claim? Well, a call about the status of your disability claim may alert the claims representative who did your intake that your claim has not actually made it to the state disability agency for processing; consequently, at that point they may be able to locate your claim and "send it down".

Of course, there are other reasons to call the social security office, such as providing updated contact information (for changes regarding an address or phone number). This can be particularly helpful when disability examiners need additional information but have been unable to reach a disability claimant. In such scenarios, disability examiners (the individuals who actually work on processing disability claims for the social security administration) will sometimes call the social security office where a disability application was filed in an attempt to gain additional contact information. However, if a claimant has not kept social security up-to-date, then the social security office will have no additional information to provide to the examiner. And the result could be that a claim is denied for "failure to cooperate" or "whereabouts unknown".

On a practical note, however, I should point out that calling to check on your social security disability claim can be a matter of when and where. What do I mean by this? Basically that the proper place to call for a status update will often depend on where your claim currently is in the system.

For example, if you have only recently filed your claim (say, in the last 2-3 weeks), you may wish to direct inquiries about your case to the social security office where you filed the claim. After this point, however, it is likely that the case will have been transferred to a disability examiner. Therefore, the disability examiner at the state disability agency (usually known as DDS, or disability determination services) should be called for status inquiries. How do you get the number for the examiner? You can easily do this by calling the social security office where you applied and asking them for the number.

Typically, though, for a true status update, the disability examiner (if the case is at the disability application or reconsideration appeal level) will be the preferred source to call. Why is this? Because the disability examiner is the individual who actually works on the case, while the social security office is simply the place where the disability application is taken before it is forwarded to the state disability agency. In fact, if the case is actively being worked (meaning that medical records are being acquired and evaluated), then the disability examiner may be the only source of information as the social security office will have no knowledge of what has and has not been done on the case (translation: the social security office has nothing to do with making the actual decision on the case)