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What Is Due Five Business Days Before Michigan SSDI Hearings
A Michigan Social Security Disability hearing comes with a filing deadline that arrives in the hearing notice and is easy to read past. Written evidence not already in the file has to be submitted to the administrative law judge, or at least disclosed, five business days before the hearing date, and a judge who receives it later is allowed to refuse it.
The rule is 20 C.F.R. § 404.935. Each party must make every effort to get all of the evidence in front of the judge, and must inform the agency about or submit any written evidence no later than five business days before the scheduled hearing. Evidence that misses the deadline may be declined unless one of the exceptions in the rule’s second paragraph applies.
On a claim that has waited a year or more for a date at the Grand Rapids, Detroit, or Lansing hearing office, the last week before the hearing is a poor time to learn that a records request is still outstanding. The five-business-day rule is the requirement in 20 C.F.R. § 404.935 that a claimant inform the administrative law judge about, or submit, all written evidence no later than five business days before the hearing. At Neumann Law Group, we build the hearing file for Michigan Social Security Disability clients backward from that date rather than forward from the notice.
75 Days of Notice and the Six Things It Must Contain
Under 20 C.F.R. § 404.938, the notice of hearing is mailed to the last known address, or personally served, at least 75 days before the hearing date. The regulation lists what the notice has to contain.
- The specific issues to be decided in the case.
- That the claimant may designate a representative.
- How to request a change in the time or place of the hearing.
- That the hearing may be dismissed if neither the claimant nor the representative appears without good reason.
- The time and manner of appearance, whether in person, by agency video, or otherwise, and the place where the appearance is in person or by video.
- That all written evidence not already in the record must be submitted or disclosed no later than five business days before the hearing.
The notice also asks for a returned acknowledgment form, and an unreturned form prompts the agency to make contact. A claimant who reports never receiving the notice gets an amended one by certified mail. An amended notice, or a notice of a supplemental hearing after a continuance, needs only 20 days of lead time rather than 75.
Informing the Judge Counts, Even When the Records Have Not Arrived
The rule says inform or submit, and the difference is the part that saves claims. A claimant who has requested records from a named provider and not received them can tell the judge so, in writing, before the deadline. Section 404.935(b) then directs the judge to accept the evidence when it does arrive, provided no decision has yet issued, where the claimant actively and diligently sought it from the source and it was not received, or was received less than five business days before the hearing.
The other exceptions are narrower. The judge will also accept late evidence where the agency’s own action misled the claimant, where a physical, mental, educational, or linguistic limitation prevented earlier submission, or where an unusual, unexpected, or unavoidable circumstance did, with serious illness, a death or serious illness in the immediate family, and records destroyed by fire or accident given as examples. None of these covers a claimant who did not ask for the records until the hearing was close.
The duty behind the deadline is older and broader. 20 C.F.R. § 404.1512 requires a claimant to inform the agency about or submit all evidence known to the claimant that relates to whether they are disabled, in its entirety, as an ongoing duty at every level of review. The agency considers only impairments the claimant says they have or about which it receives evidence, so a condition never mentioned is a condition never evaluated.
A file that stops at the reconsideration denial is the most common shape a hearing file arrives in, and the months since that denial are usually where the useful records are. Reading an exhibit list against a provider list is the first hour we spend with a new client. We are glad to look at it with you before anything is filed. Call us at (800) 525-6386.
Why Requested Records Still Arrive Late
The agency’s own timetable shows how slowly medical records move. Section 404.1512(b) defines the every reasonable effort SSA owes a claimant as one initial request to a medical source, one follow-up between 10 and 20 calendar days later if nothing has come, and then at least 10 more calendar days for the source to reply. That is a month budgeted for one provider, assuming it answers on the second attempt. A hospital system’s release-of-information office, or a specialty practice that treats the request as a low priority, can take longer.
A treating-source functional assessment, the document a hearing most often lacks, has the same problem in a different form, because it asks a busy clinician to write something new rather than copy something old. A request made 30 days before the hearing will likely produce a document after the deadline, and the judge’s willingness to accept it will then depend on whether the request and the follow-up were documented. Once the file is closed, the hearing itself turns on testimony, and the vocational expert’s answers to the judge’s hypothetical questions, described on our Michigan ALJ hearing page, are built on whatever limitations the written record supports.
A Calendar Counted Backward From the Hearing Date
The 75-day notice period and the five-business-day deadline together leave roughly 10 weeks to finish a file. In the first week the acknowledgment goes back, the exhibit list is compared against every provider seen since the reconsideration denial, and requests go out, because the agency’s own timetable says the answers take a month.
Around the midpoint, unanswered requests get a documented follow-up and the functional assessment request goes to the treating provider with the deadline stated. Two weeks out, anything still outstanding is described to the judge in writing, by source and date requested, so that the diligence exception is on the record before it is needed.
The hearing queue at Michigan’s hearing offices, which our SSDI timeline page describes as historically the longest wait in the process, means that most of the evidence the judge will need did not exist when the hearing was requested. A file complete at reconsideration is, by the hearing date, a year out of date.
Getting the Record to the Judge While It Still Counts
Five business days is a short deadline at the end of a long wait, and it is enforced by a judge who has the discretion to enforce it. For claimants across Michigan with a hearing notice in hand, we review the exhibit list and the provider list together at Neumann Law Group. We are happy to talk it through with you. Call (800) 525-6386 or contact our office.