As of 2015, United States Census Bureau reported that 12 percent of the American population, or 40 million people, were disabled.
In 1999, the Social Security Administration (SSA) reported that at least half of the disability payments applications that they received that year were denied. Since then, the number of people applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) has more than doubled. As of 2014, the SSA reported that only one-third of applications end up getting approved.
One of perhaps the most common reasons that SSDI applications get denied is because the applicant makes too much money in order to qualify. Currently, an applicant must receive no more than $1,180 in monthly income in order to qualify for further consideration.
SSDI applicants are also commonly denied benefits because they didn’t pay into the system enough to qualify for them. In this case, a worker may not have held a job that allowed them to accumulate enough working credits. Whether they do is contingent upon their age and the amount of time they worked before their disabling incident occurred. The older that a worker is, the higher the chance there is of them having the necessary credits.
Applicants are also often denied SSDI because the SSA itself doesn’t consider them to have a disability. Even if they do, they may deny a claim simply because its onset isn’t well-documented or its expected progression isn’t clear.
SSA reviewers are trained to deny claims that aren’t expected to affect individuals for more than a year or if it isn’t expected to impact their ability to work as they had been able to before. If the SSA determines that the applicant is able to work by holding down a different role from what they had been working in, then they may also deny an SSDI claim.
Applicants who submit incomplete records or ones riddled with technical errors can also end up with a denied SSDI application.
Applying for benefits may seem easy enough up until you get that letter in the mail telling you that you won’t be receiving them. When that happens, you may wonder how you’re going to make ends meet. An experienced Trenton attorney can review your submission to see what errors likely resulted in the denial. They then can advise you what may help get your application approved.