Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you today. I hope that my observations will be useful to you. They come from my tenure as an Administrative Law Judge with the Social Security Administration's Office of Hearings and Appeals and from my 28 years of private practice in representing Social Security claimants. To comply with the rule referenced in the Subcommittee's invitation, I have provided a copy of my curriculum vitae with this statement. I have received no government grants or contracts in the past two years.
Good advocates develop and marshal the evidence and present arguments at hearing.
From my many years in private practice, I have learned that good advocacy is much more. I also answer many questions and provide information that my clients would otherwise try to seek from the Social Security Administration. As you know from previous hearings, the amount of time that SSA personnel spend with individual claimants and their questions has become very limited. We have just begun to see the impact of this new fee, because the agency did not begin to apply it until February 1. My colleagues who practice in this field and I are certainly very distressed by this user fee.