Whenever the Social Security Administration denies a disability claim, whether it’s the initial application or at a hearing, part of the process is that they’ll name several jobs that a claimant can supposedly perform despite their medical conditions.
Many times, these jobs are positions that claimants are unfamiliar with, such as document preparer, addresser, or small products assembler.
And if they have hard of these jobs, something that I hear repeatedly from clients is that these jobs simply do not exist anywhere close to them. This is particularly a problem for those who live in rural areas where there may only be a handful of employers.
So, how does Social Security view whether jobs are actually within a reasonable distance of you? The unfortunate answer to that question is that it’s not really taken into account.
Social Security only looks at the number of jobs available in the national economy. So, even though there may not be a document preparer job within 100 miles of your home, Social Security can still find that you’re not disabled because there are supposedly thousands of those jobs available somewhere in the country.
That doesn’t mean that a finding that you can perform one of these jobs means there’s no way to win a case, though. In recent years, Social Security has started to find that some of the jobs it previously relied upon in unfavorable decisions in fact no longer exist. And an attorney can argue that these jobs do not exist in sufficient numbers.
But it’s a tricky area of the law, and another reason why getting a Social Security disability attorney is a good idea before beginning the process.
