WASHINGTON – A judge, an attorney and a number of doctors pocketed more than $4.5 million by fraudulently ensuring that disability claimants would receive federal Social Security benefits, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs reported Monday.
The committee released a report detailing the findings of a two-year investigation into the Huntington, W.Va., Social Security Office of Disability Adjunction and Review.
The investigation found that Eric Conn of the Kentucky-based Conn Law Firm, worked in cahoots with an administrative law judge, who had responsibility for ruling on disability claims. The firm received more than $4.5 million from the Social Security Administration in attorney fees for obtaining disability benefits for thousands of claimants whose claims were improperly granted. Conn also compensated doctors up to $650 per case for signing off on medical opinions supporting claimants’ disability applications.
The firm declined to comment on the allegations.
The Social Security disability assistance program, which provides more than $200 billion in benefits to nearly 14 million Americans annually, is at risk of running out of funding by 2016, according to the trustees who oversee the program.
“With the clock ticking on the agency’s trust fund, some in Congress refuse to acknowledge the disability programs are broken and are in dire need of significant oversight,” said Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a doctor and the top Republican on the committee, in prepared remarks. “While lawyers, doctors were getting rich by exploiting a broken program, the real victims were the claimants and the American taxpayer.”
The committee recommended that a Social Security Administration professional should represent the government in all disability claims hearings before administrative law judges.
However, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the investigation did not prove the benefits awarded to the claimants were correct.
“The point of this hearing is not to attack our disability programs, which play a critical role in the lives of many Americans,” Levin said, “but to spotlight the abusive conduct of a group of legal, medical, and judicial professionals exploiting those programs, and recommend measures to prevent similar abuses in the future.”
In 2011, an investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations confirmed a previous review that disability decisions made by judges were insufficient 22 percent of the time nationwide. Judges’ decisions were also found to be a result of poor hearing practices and insufficient medical evidence.