Disability benefits dogged by arduous, outdated paperwork, auditor general finds
TheStar.com – News/Canada – Just 7 per cent of terminally ill people applying for CPP disability payments got a decision on within the 48-hour guideline. Just over half of those with chronic conditions had their cases decided on within the established 30-day window.
Feb 02 2016. By: Jordan Press, The Canadian Press
OTTAWA—Canadians with terminal illnesses are waiting too long for disability pension benefits from the federal government, and those with grave conditions are being snowed under with paperwork, Canada’s auditor general says.
In his latest twice-annual assessment of various federal government departments, agencies and programs, Michael Ferguson’s most eyebrow-raising findings came from his examination of how Ottawa parcels out Canada Pension Plan disability benefits and deals with disputed denials.
While the audit found no documented cases of patients dying while waiting for benefits, it did find that guidelines for decisions weren’t always being met.
A mere 7 per cent of terminally ill people applying for Canadan Pension Plan disability payments got a decision on their application within the government’s 48-hour guideline, while just over half of those with chronic conditions had their cases decided on within the established 30-day window.
Getting to that point takes months and mountains of paperwork, an unnecessary burden that auditors say could be eliminated and put online, such as is already the case with employment insurance.
Once inside the system, auditors found the department had little in the way of a quality assurance system to make sure that decisions were consistent. The audit found that one-third of applicants originally denied disability benefits were later found to be eligible, raising questions about why they were denied in the first place.
If denied a second time by the department, applicants would then turn to the tribunal, which was established in 2013 in an effort to eliminate a growing backlog of cases. Instead, Canadians waited an average of 884 days for the tribunal to make a decision.
That led to the government setting up a triage unit in the department to deal with cases — a unit whose mandate has no end in sight — all because the new tribunal had been set up without consulting officials who ran the previous appeals system. As a result, the tribunal was left understaffed and under-resourced to deal with a backlog of more than 6,500 cases at its inception — a backlog that had swelled to 10,871 cases by December 2014.
In one case cited in the audit, the tribunal accidentally dropped a request for a speedier hearing from a patient with terminal cancer. Even though the tribunal eventually denied disability benefits on non-medical grounds, the person “had to wait longer than necessary for a decision,” auditors found.
The critical review of the benefits system was one of seven audits released by Ferguson’s office Tuesday that illustrate what Ferguson characterized as good intentions falling short of their mark.
Ferguson also found that 20 years after vowing to assess how legislation and programs affect men and women, the federal government had made limited progress on that front. Ferguson’s auditors found gender-based analyses were not always complete or consistent across departments.
< http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/02/02/disability-benefits-dogged-by-arduous-outdated-paperwork-auditor-general-finds.html >
Tags: disabilities, Health, mental Health, standard of living
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Governance Delivery System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
One Response to “Disability benefits dogged by arduous, outdated paperwork, auditor general finds”
|
Leave a Reply
Recent Comments
Upon reviewing this article, two main things stood out to me. The first is that wait times which individuals have to endure when applying for disability benefits are completely irrational and unacceptable. Often times, when someone is applying for disability benefits, it means they are not working and therefore may not be generating any income at all. Especially if an individual is living alone or in a single-income household with or without dependents, disability benefits could become a crucial determinant of whether they will be able to afford much needed medications or even pay their rent. Both of these examples could lead to even larger issues such as severe illness or homelessness. In addition, if the application for disability benefits was put online as the article suggested, this could pose as a challenge for those who might not know how to use a computer or have access to one. The second thing that stood out to me from the article are the inconsistencies in deciding who is and is not eligible to receive benefits. In a sense, lacking a quality assurance system may result in some groups of people who may already be oppressed as a result of their gender, race, sexuality, etc., being further denied assistance to benefits that they desperately require due to illness or disability.