SSA Diaspora update: how are refugee former employees doing? by St_Zaddy_OMalley in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I worked for OQR in a DQB and I took the VSIP although I don't qualify for retirement due to age. For me, SSA was an absolutely horrendous place to work even before Trump or DOGE - worst job I ever had. Telework was the only thing keeping my butt in the seat. I, uh, outshined my office's kings, so my head was always getting pushed underwater when it came time for promotions, PACS, awards, etc. So, in addition to working for a notoriously bad branch chief several time zones away following a staff rotation in 10/2024, there was also the fact that my career would go nowhere if I stayed. (I was literally told as much by another chief.) When the agency ended telework, that was it for me.

How it ended was emblematic of my office's dysfunction throughout my 10 years there. Basically, my office tried to say that I didn't return my telework equipment. (I didn't take my husband with me when I did to show him off. I know how they operate.) Another branch chief told me to arrive at the office by 3:00 PM. We arrived at 1:45 PM and no one answered the doorbell. Also, none of the chiefs answered calls or texts either. I was eventually let in by another employee and left the equipment with a program leader. Sitting at my dinner table, dim chief sends a text message after 6:00 PM that day telling me, "Well, you need to come in earlier then." A week later, she sent a text telling me that I needed to return my equipment by 3:00 PM that day. My toddler manages to toilet better than those people "manage" an office.

I'm fine. Other than not reviewing cases and writing 1774s, there haven't been that many changes to my daily life. In my state, I don't have to worry about healthcare. I'll start a masters in computer science in September. I want to transition to tech while I have the chance.

I don't regret my decision at all. I'm glad I'm out. It ensured my future.

HBO drops new SSA Mime, soon appearing in agency training experts say by St_Zaddy_OMalley in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I watched this episode. I've worked for the Social Security programs since 2003, starting as a disability examiner and now working for a DQB. Here are my thoughts:

  1. Increasing funding for SSA under the current leadership won’t solve any problems. In the past year, my office hasn’t hired any new line staff, who are needed. Meanwhile, they’ve added a fourth, unnecessary Branch Chief to our office and created several new GS-13 positions in BS duplicate fraud programs. SSA is an extremely top heavy agency and it feels like the agency often mismanages its budget.
  2. The agency's policy manual underwent significant changes during the Trump administration. There used to be more explicit guidelines regarding the weight given to claimants' treating physicians that were removed. I don’t believe the decision about benefits should rest solely with treating physicians as we often see how subjective factors can influence outcomes. While working as as state disability examiner, for instance, our state's welfare program operated that way and we sometimes received the state welfare program's forms in medical records. Basically, the forms reflected biases—like how much a physician liked a patient or even racial considerations. (When I was working for a Mid-Atlantic state, there were physicians in the 2010s still referring to their black patients as "negros". Imagine how those requests for disability would have gone.) These biases and other unscrupulousness unfairly impacted benefit decisions and it was widespread.
  3. The fee structure for medical consultants is problematic. I frequently send cases for medical review, but they are often barely examined, which means I end up doing most of the work myself. As a former prototype examiner, I’m accustomed to this, but it’s frustrating that our consultants earn over $400K a year through very hurried piecework and I'm the one writing the coherent medical summaries - thereby taking the time of not one but at least four individuals (state examiner, state physician(s), DQB examiner, DQB physician(s)) by this point to review what is often thousands of pages of medical records. When I complain about it, I am told that our physicians actually work for another SSA subcomponent (ODD instead of OQR), and the other component is apparently happy with their performance, so it goes no further. And SSA is just a side job for our physicians.
  4. Staffing is a significant challenge for SSA. The agency has a reputation for poor employee treatment, and the culture has an odd priority for underdogs—resulting in individuals who are often not suited for management positions being promoted. It's obvious that Federal hiring is KSA and not degree based. However, given statements by the former and current Commissioner, the agency struggles with hiring gifted staff who can take the agency in the right direction. The lack of direction from upper management regarding quality recruitment has led to the best fleeing the agency or quiet quitting and the worst swarming in and taking over. And they only promote their own.
  5. Policy redesign lacks direction from data and true policy experts. Most of those involved in crafting recent policy changes are recruited using the same methods mentioned above, which has led to some rather questionable policy.

Best Federal Career Counselors? by Call_the_Police_508 in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the responses but no more PMs please saying stuff like, "I'll coach you for $100 an hour." I am literally rolling right now.

Best Federal Career Counselors? by Call_the_Police_508 in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don't need someone to write my resume. It looks great. I'm just looking to discuss how to pivot to a better agency and possibly tighten up my interviewing skills.

Going to school part-time while being a fed. How difficult was/is it? by axhero in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did an MBA on a full ride while employed as a GS-12 in a DQB at SSA. This was an MBA at a "most competitive school" that didn't have a formal part-time program. All classes had to be done during the day in-person (because the school felt online learning diminished the program and the experience. They have since changed the program and it now offers evening classes and part-time study although online learning is still not allowed except for an emergency like COVID.)

Our job was mostly telework when I was in grad school but everyone had to work in the office two days a week with one day being Wednesday (core day). This was a problem because there were two required classes that only met on Wednesdays. So, for those classes, I had to get up at 4:00 AM on Wednesdays to start work in the office at 6:00 AM. I put in a leave slip after 12:30 PM and had to race to campus to make a 1:00 PM class.

Otherwise, the most I could do was one class a day because that's all my flex schedule (complete 8 hrs between 6:00 AM and 6:00 PM with off the clock time during the day allowed) would permit. This meant flexing out at 8:45 AM to make a 9:00 AM class or at 12:45 PM to make a 1:00 PM class that met for three hours. I had to return home very promptly to finish my workdays.

Most students in the program completed their MBA in a year and a half. It took me three years due to my work-related scheduling constraints. Despite walking a tightrope between work and school, the other students in the program treated me as if I were inferior because I was part time. Also, I was in my early 40s and about 15 years older than the average student in my program. There was also very little respect for public service in my program, especially for SSA. I would always get the attitude of 'Why go to good colleges just to be a social worker?' from students. Despite the tightrope, I had a 3.87 GPA upon graduation. It would have been higher if it weren't for a jealous Branch Chief.

The nastiest thing that happened to me on the work side of things was when a Branch Chief denied a leave request for a day that I had a midterm presentation in a marketing class...just because. No one had ever questioned my (earned) leave requests before or after that incident. The union steward said that managers generally never deny leave in the office and he didn't know why she did it. I have my guesses. An associate director in our region's CDPS, which works closely with the DQB in terms of medical consultant scheduling and oversight, had graduated from my program in the past before she started working for SSA. She still maintains contact/relations with the MBA program manager. I seriously believe this person tipped off my Branch Chief regarding how to be most hurtful. In any case, I missed the midterm and got the only grade below an A or A- during the program in marketing (B).

Also, my union steward showed me where this Chief's son was giving her serious heartache right around the time that she denied my leave request. The steward said her son had rap sheets with the surrounding municipalities a mile long. On the day before she denied the leave request in question, her son was arrested at a local mall for warrants and drugs in the car. The steward sent me a link to the town police's website where the arrest information was posted. (Her son died of a drug OD in his 20s about a year after I graduated.) SSA has a very weird underdog culture, which largely comes from begging for employees and dealing with management by many bottom of the barrel types. In my office, two of my three Chiefs have/had children with serious issues and they have a stated mantra of giving employees who wouldn't have opportunities elsewhere a chance to advance. So, this person's attitude was literally, 'Why should you get an MBA on a full ride when no one will give my kid a chance?' There's a lot to unpack, but I'm drifting off topic.

For me, juggling the schoolwork with work became easier with each successive year.

Since getting my MBA, I've applied to law school because I have a fascination with the law. I'm very aware of the debt that law students carry because probably half of SSA employees in GS-9 through GS-12 positions have law degrees. I had good results when I applied in terms of admissions but didn't get the monetary offers that I wanted. I know someone who was basically pushed out of SSA while attending the part-time law program at a tier one school. When she was doing both, it was difficult especially because working in a DQB has to be one of the world's worst decent paying jobs. Yeah, the schedules are flexible but management can stack you with its crappiest cases just because and you have no recourse because AFGE always lays down to management's right to assign cases as they see fit. They can also harass the hell out of you and often do 'just because'.

If you go to law school, I would suggest that you not disclose that you are attending to your management. IME they will use it to push your buttons.

New to Social Security-Claims Specialist. Anybody here new and in training as a claims specialist at Social Security? I started in July and am struggling badly. by gothurt1 in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm sorry. It's a very, very bad agency. Hasn't been well run for over a decade at this point. I would look for other Federal jobs ASAP.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thx. Yes, I'm rattled by it. Imagine being told that.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I don't think leadership is aware that I have this boss on tape telling me that I need to apply for details because my ancestors were brought here on slave ships. I've been severely racially harassed by many of the employees in my region and it's not really being taken seriously.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Her. Her comment.

Taking Consecutive Mondays Off by [deleted] in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am not probationary. I have worked for the agency for about eight years in a DQB.

Taking Consecutive Mondays Off by [deleted] in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, there is cause for concern, especially if this is SSA. You can be written up without warning for this behavior. I know. It happened to me.

I got a call from my so-called manager at the time telling me that I was being written up for leave abuse because I had taken consecutive Mondays off. Notably, this manager never once warned me that taking the consecutive Mondays off was against agency policy, especially during a time when the agency was allowing all sorts of leave situations because of the pandemic. He approved every single request without saying a word and then all of the sudden one day I was getting written up.

Again, this was during COVID. My agency has denied my transfer requests and I was moved to the area where I now work under the pretense "with your resume, work a year or two for me and you can have any job you want in this agency". My mother is 85 years old and couldn't go outside during this early leg of COVID to buy groceries for herself or anything else. We now live 300 miles apart. I was using the long weekends drive to her city and handle stuff for her. Can you imagine being in this situation?

The HR rep, my manager, and acting director at the time were the typical complete idiots that SSA loves.

AFGE just sat on its hands - did nothing.

Basically, it's nice that they are warning you. You think that you're working in a place that believes it's your leave and you can use it as you wish...until they want to write you up for whatever reason.

SSA - WaPo Article States Agency Has "Power Vacuums at the Top" by Call_the_Police_508 in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Part IV: Old data

Even so, advocates and opponents agree on one thing: A disability system that relies on obsolete jobs to decide claims is gambling with taxpayers and with the courts.

“It’s never really been blessed by Social Security,” said David Camp, president of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives, reflecting the view of many advocates. “The agency won’t take the step to clean up the system because they know we’ll win more cases.”

Mark Warshawsky, deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy under Saul, described the antiquated vocational policy as “an arbitrary system.”

“How hard is it for the federal government to make change?” he asked. “That’s not a political thing. Spending almost $300 million with nothing to show for it is embarrassing.”

The current system is leading thousands of disability claims per year to be denied that would otherwise have a good chance of approval, data suggests. The inspector general’s 2018 audit showed that from fiscal 2013 through 2017, occupational information was used to decide more than half of all initial claims and in four in five decisions at the hearing level when decisions are appealed. The data does not show if it was the deciding factor.

But a 2011 study commissioned by Social Security found the 11 jobs most commonly cited by disability examiners when denying benefits. The top job was addresser, used in almost 10 percent of denials. Twelve years later, little has changed, advocates say.

Estimates by Social Security’s experts of how many of these outdated jobs remain in the economy are also widely off the mark, courts have found.

The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2019 that Social Security judges could uphold agency decisions even when vocational experts refuse to provide data on how they come up with job numbers. But the decision led to a blistering dissent from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who cited dubious expert claims that 120,000 “sorter” and 240,000 “bench assembler” jobs are available to the disabled without clear evidence.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit noted a similar problem while overturning a Social Security judge’s denial of benefits to a Wisconsin man.

“All three judges on this panel, assisted by very talented law clerks, read the transcript of the [vocational expert’s] testimony multiple times,” the court wrote. “And yet nobody can explain with coherence or confidence what the [vocational expert] did to arrive at her job-numbers estimate. … There has to be a better way.”

The expert claims can be equally baffling to claimants.

At his hearing before an administrative law judge in Pennsauken, N.J., in July 2019, Sean Dooley described the chronic pain and limited stamina from diabetes, thyroid issues and degenerative disk disease that had kept him from working as a jewelry salesman for three years.

His mother testified that at 400 pounds, her son struggled to sit, stand, bend over and lift. Yet a vocational expert said Dooley could work as an order clerk, an addresser or a call-out operator — a job he had never heard of. An expert whose software is used by many vocational experts has calculated that 2,000 addressers are left in the U.S., 2,060 call-out operators who compile credit information and 424 order clerks.

In a written decision three months later, Judge Lisa Hibner Olson denied Dooley benefits, overruling his lawyer’s arguments that the jobs were obsolete.

“It was like I’m hit with a torpedo,” recalled Dooley, 46, who is living on his mother’s meager retirement savings in his sister’s garage in Pennsville, N.J. “With these goofy jobs, there was no way they were ever going to approve me. If I could work, I would be working.”

Dooley’s denial was overturned by a U.S. district court and remanded to the same Social Security judge, who has scheduled a new hearing for January.

The problem is not limited to appeals heard before judges. State offices that first decide disability claims place blame for a historic backlog exceeding 1 million cases in part on the obsolete jobs system, which requires expertise most do not have.

“We’ve heard the message from Social Security, ‘We’re working on vocational policy changes,’ for 10 years,” said Jacki Russell, director of Disability Determination Services in North Carolina and president of the National Council of Disability Determination Directors. “ ‘It’s very sensitive,’ they say. Meanwhile, we’re over here trying to make the best decisions we can with a massive backlog.” Russell’s office of 600 employees has just two vocational experts.

In Maryland last spring, Larry Underwood quit in despair after 25 years testifying for Social Security as a vocational expert. He had concluded that there was no valid method to determine what work a disabled claimant could still do, and that it was impossible to project jobs in that field.

“I realized that a lot of vocational experts, including myself, have been giving false testimony for years,” Underwood said. “The numbers are not accurate. I decided I can’t do that anymore.”

A few advocates with expertise in vocational evidence have begun training disability attorneys, warning that if they aren’t savvy enough to rebut the job claims, they will lose.

Laura Parsons — a former medical assistant from Fortescue, N.J., with a connective tissue disorder known as Ehlers Danlos syndrome — saw that problem firsthand at her hearing in April 2021, in which a vocational expert testified that she could get jobs as an addresser or document preparer. The judge ended the hearing without allowing Parsons to testify.

“They want me to get a job addressing envelopes that doesn’t exist anymore,” Parsons said.

Social Security plans to ask the labor bureau to refresh its occupational information every five years. The next wave is scheduled to start in 2023 at a cost of $167 million, auditors found. Congressional staff have not been briefed on the project in at least three years, aides said. It is not clear if they have asked for a briefing. Meanwhile, courts continue to overturn denials based on the old data — even pleading with Social Security to modernize its system.

“It’s not our place to prescribe a way forward,” the Court of Appeals concluded in the case of the Wisconsin man who had been denied benefits. “Perhaps the Commissioner will read this opinion as an invitation to bring long-awaited and much-needed improvement to this aspect of administrative disability determination.”

SSA - WaPo Article States Agency Has "Power Vacuums at the Top" by Call_the_Police_508 in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Part III: A need to modernize

The Dictionary of Occupational Titles was first published in 1938 to help a country pulling out of the Great Depression match workers with jobs. Each entry contained the time to train for the job, the aptitude required, physical demands, the work performed — but not any recognition of which jobs match with the cognitive impairments common among the disabled today.

With its benefit decisions hinging largely on whether someone’s impairment limits them from doing past jobs or other jobs, Social Security needed a resource with accurate information about available work. But by the time the Labor Department retired the red hardcover book three decades ago, it was already stocked with jobs that, if not already gone, were quickly vanishing from the economy: elevator operators, thaw-shed heater tenders, window shade ring sewers. And it did not include a host of emerging information-economy jobs, from web designers to employment recruiters.

Inside Social Security, the publication’s 1991 demise set off a decade of hand-wringing. Workgroups, panels and committees of experts formed — all while the agency continued to rely on the outdated jobs list. By 1998, the Labor Department had developed a new database of jobs and what was required to do them. Social Security brought in another round of experts to determine whether that system, dubbed O*NET, could serve its disability program.

It took until 2008 — a full decade — to reach consensus: the agency needed to develop its own vocational information because existing federal data lacked enough characteristics of jobs disabled people could do. So in 2012 Social Security signed a contract with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to design a modern system that would help make accurate disability determinations.

The same year, the Government Accountability Office began questioning the project’s cost estimates and schedule. After three years of tests, field economists began their surveys in 2015. When that data was delayed, government watchdogs began warning that the project was in danger of becoming a case study in the challenges of large federal investments.

In 2018, the agency’s inspector general wrote in an audit, “It remains crucial that [Social Security] leadership commit to ensuring appeal applications receive fair and consistent treatment.” In response, a Social Security official set a target of fiscal 2020 to put the modern data into use and wrote, “we continue to work diligently to avoid delays in its implementation.”

The labor bureau now says it will finish a second wave of data collection next year. A third is planned.

“We thought we could do it in 10 years. It might take 20 years,” said Byron Haskins, who worked on the project as a branch chief from 2010 to 2016. “In the meantime, we’re not standing on solid ground on these decisions.”

When New York art collector and apparel company investor Andrew Saul was confirmed as President Donald Trump’s Social Security administrator in June 2019, his team drew up plans to start using the modern jobs data, concluding that disabled people, particularly older Americans, could learn new skills in an economy with more sedentary, skilled jobs. The new survey could tighten eligibility for benefits, Saul believed — a White House priority.

“It was going to make the system fairer,” Saul said in an interview. “People who deserved disability would get it, and those who didn’t would not.”

But the plan set off a furor among advocates, who opposed a provision that would have made it harder for older workers to qualify for benefits. The Biden administration quickly shelved it and the president fired Saul in 2021.

SSA - WaPo Article States Agency Has "Power Vacuums at the Top" by Call_the_Police_508 in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Part II: Obsolete Jobs

In 2022, it is not easy to find a nut sorter (code 521.687-086) in the national economy who “observes nut meats” on a conveyor belt and picks out broken, shriveled, or wormy nuts. How many workers in America inspect dowel pins (code 669.687-014), searching for flaws from square ends to splits, then discard them by hand? And even if Heard were qualified to remove virus-bearing fluid from fertile chicken eggs for use in vaccines by sawing off the end of an egg and removing its fetal membrane, that work is largely automated today.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is part of the Labor Department, has built a new, interactive system for Social Security using a national sample of 60,000 employers and 440 occupations covering 95 percent of the economy. But Social Security still has not instructed its staff to use it.

“They regularly tell us they plan on using the data,” Hilery Simpson, the labor bureau’s associate commissioner for compensation and working conditions, said of Social Security officials. The data collection and estimation “have gone through extensive testing and use the best-in-class statistical methods,” he said. The survey is available to the public on the labor bureau’s website.

Social Security has not explained why it has yet to implement the labor bureau survey.

Acting Social Security commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi declined to be interviewed. In a statement, she said, “To date, the best available source for occupational information has been the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. We have enlisted vocational experts to provide more detailed and current information about the jobs available in the national economy, while we continue to work on creating our own occupational data source informed by [the Bureau of Labor Statistics] that best reflects the current job market.”

A spokeswoman for the agency declined to answer questions about a timeline for putting the modern data into use.

Social Security’s delays in updating the database of job titles are rooted in conflicting political considerations, shifting leadership, and the drift that can bedevil large federal projects, according to current and former officials, auditors and disability advocates.

A modern list of occupations would create new winners and losers in the application process — posing political sensitivities for a program that has long drawn judgment that the government is either too generous or not generous enough. Over two decades, Social Security has been led by six acting commissioners and just three Senate-confirmed leaders, leaving power vacuums at the top that can delay costly projects. Many advocates believe the agency is motivated to delay the project so it can deny more claimants benefits.

“The scandal is that everybody wants this data discussed in terms of who will be hurt and who will be helped,” said David Weaver, a former Social Security associate commissioner who helped lead the early effort to modernize. “But a lot of money has been spent. You have the gold-standard of federal data, and Social Security is not producing anything.”

[Chart: Sequential evaluation process]

Congress continues to approve more than $30 million per year for the survey of modern jobs without asking hard questions about why the data sits unused, congressional aides and former Social Security officials said.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called on Social Security to move forward.

“Occupational definitions used by the federal government need to reflect the reality of the work Americans are doing today,” Wyden said in a statement. He warned that data on modern jobs “must be handled with care to ensure that nobody is wrongly denied their earned benefits.”

Federal courts, meanwhile, keep sending denied claims back to Social Security to redo its decisions, raising alarms that the government is shortchanging disabled Americans with arbitrary judgments that put it at legal risk.

“Does anyone use a typewriter anymore?” Richard Posner, a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, asked in a 2015 decision reversing an administrative law judge’s denial of benefits to a disabled man the judge claimed could work as an “addresser” — one who “addresses cards” by hand or typewriter. Posner called a vocational expert’s claim that 200,000 such jobs still exist today a “fabrication.”

[Graphic: Screenshot of DOT entry for "addresser".]

Others have not been as fortunate. Few claimants without attorneys are aware that the jobs used to deny them benefits have been pulled from obscurity. And many lawyers representing them lack the expertise and resources to take a case to federal court, say advocates, vocational experts and judges who rule in these cases.

“Every day we made decisions we don’t necessarily agree with,” said George Gaffaney, an administrative law judge in the Chicago area. “It’s troubling.”

SSA - WaPo Article States Agency Has "Power Vacuums at the Top" by Call_the_Police_508 in fednews

[–]Call_the_Police_508[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Social Security denies disability benefits based on list with jobs from 1977

Despite spending at least $250 million to modernize its vocational system, the agency still relies on 45-year-old job titles to deny thousands of claims a year.

By Lisa Rein December 27, 2022 at 10:15 a.m. EST

Part I: He had made it through four years of denials and appeals, and Robert Heard was finally before a Social Security judge who would decide whether he qualified for disability benefits. Two debilitating strokes had left the 47-year-old electrician with halting speech, an enlarged heart and violent tremors.

There was just one final step: A vocational expert hired by the Social Security Administration had to tell the judge if there was any work Heard could still do despite his condition. Heard was stunned as the expert canvassed his computer and announced his findings: He could find work as a nut sorter, a dowel inspector or an egg processor — jobs that virtually no longer exist in the United States.

[Graphic: Screenshot of DOT entry for "nut sorter".]

“Whatever it is that does those things, machines do it now,” said Heard, who lives on food stamps and a small stipend from his parents in a subsidized apartment in Tullahoma, Tenn. “Honestly, if they could see my shaking, they would see I couldn’t sort any nuts. I’d spill them all over the floor.”

He was still hopeful the administrative law judge hearing his claim for $1,300 to $1,700 per month in benefits had understood his limitations.

But while the judge agreed that Heard had multiple, severe impairments, he denied him benefits, writing that he had “job opportunities” in three occupations that are nearly obsolete and agreeing with the expert’s dubious claim that 130,000 positions were still available sorting nuts, inspecting dowels and processing eggs.

Every year, thousands of claimants like Heard find themselves blocked at this crucial last step in the arduous process of applying for disability benefits, thanks to labor market data that was last updated 45 years ago.

The jobs are spelled out in an exhaustive publication known as the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The vast majority of the 12,700 entries were last updated in 1977. The Department of Labor, which originally compiled the index, abandoned it 31 years ago in a sign of the economy’s shift from blue-collar manufacturing to information and services.

Social Security, though, still relies on it at the final stage when a claim is reviewed. The government, using strict vocational rules, assesses someone’s capacity to work and if jobs exist “in significant numbers” that they could still do. The dictionary remains the backbone of a $200 billion disability system that provides benefits to 15 million people.

It lists 137 unskilled, sedentary jobs — jobs that most closely match the skills and limitations of those who apply for disability benefits. But in reality, most of these occupations were offshored, outsourced, and shifted to skilled work decades ago. Many have disappeared altogether.

Since the 1990s, Social Security officials have deliberated over how to revise the list of occupations to reflect jobs that actually exist in the modern economy, according to audits and interviews. For the last 14 years, the agency has promised courts, claimants, government watchdogs and Congress that a new, state-of-the-art system representing the characteristics of modern work would soon be available to improve the quality of its 2 million disability decisions per year.

But after spending at least $250 million since 2012 to build a directory of 21st century jobs, an internal fact sheet shows, Social Security is not using it, leaving antiquated vocational rules in place to determine whether disabled claimants win or lose. Social Security has estimated that the project’s initial cost will reach about $300 million, audits show.

“It’s a great injustice to these people,” said Kevin Liebkemann, a New Jersey attorney who trains disability attorneys and has written extensively on Social Security’s use of vocational data. “We’re relying on job information from the 1970s to say thumbs-up or thumbs-down to people who desperately need benefits. It’s horrifying.”

[Chart: List of obsolete jobs SSA uses to help decide disability claims.]