Public Health – Disability

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U.S. Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Public Health – Disability

Where the ALJ did not consider the employment available to a disability applicant, the denial of benefits must be reversed.

“As we said in the Browning case, we ‘have no idea what [is] the source or accuracy of the number of jobs that vocational experts (including the one in this case, whose estimates the administrative law judge accepted without comment) claim the plaintiff could perform that exist in the plaintiff’s area, the region, or the nation. There is no official source of number of jobs for each job classification in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, and while there are unofficial estimates of jobs in some categories, the vocational experts do not in general, and the vocational expert in this case did not, indicate what those data sources are or vouch for their accuracy. And many of them estimate the number of jobs of a type the applicant for benefits can perform by the unacceptably crude method of dividing the number of jobs in some large category (which may be the only available data) by the number of job classifications in the category, even though there is no basis for assuming’ that there is the same number of jobs in each narrow category. 766 F.3d at 709 (emphasis added). There is no indication that the estimate of the number of jobs that the applicant in this case could fill (if the administrative law judge’s estimate of his capacity to work is correct, as it may very well not have been) is any more accurate than it was in Browning.”

Reversed and Remanded.

14-2303 Voigt v. Colvin

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, Crabb, J., Posner, J.

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