An exploration of SSA’s disability determination process based on efficiency analysis

Purpose: This paper aims to estimate the performance of the social security administration (SSA) in dealing with disability benefits applications in American. Design/methodology/approach: The authors propose a multi-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to analyze the efficiency of 167 hearing offices (HOs) to find the best performed HOs and inefficient ones and detect total improvement of inefficient and weak efficient offices. Findings: The results show that totally 299,711 applications were processed and more applications will be processed if all offices can work efficiently. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one to analyze the performance of SSA HOs using the multi-stage DEA method. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one to analyze the performance of SSA HOs using the multi-stage DEA method.