Natalia Jofre: Hi I’m Natalia Jofre, I’m the Director of the Social Security section here at Hill & Ponton.
Shelly Mark: And I’m Shelly Mark, I’m the senior Social Security attorney.
Natalia Jofre: So welcome back to our Social Security Disability blog. In our last blog we talked about date last insured, what is it, and we told you that it has nothing to do with health insurance or any kind of privatized insurance. It’s basically an expiration date, if you will, for you to qualify for Social Security Disability benefits. So when you work or you pay into Social Security tax, it designates a date last insured and so you then have to prove that you’re disabled prior to that date in order to qualify for benefits.
So we told you that for the most part in order to qualify for Social Security Disability you need to have worked and paid into Social Security tax for five out of the last ten years. The next segment we’ll get into how much. Okay, because it differs, but if you have enough earnings quarters and you have a date last insured, where a variable comes into play is let’s say you last worked in 2008. That would mean that you were insured probably through 2013 and so you’re gonna have to prove that you were disabled prior to 2013 in order to qualify for benefits. But now we’re in 2017-
Shelly Mark: Right.
Natalia Jofre: And you want to apply and either you might think, well I’m past my expiration date or Social Security tells you, no, you’re past your date last insured, so you can no longer qualify for benefits. That’s not technically true. If you can prove that you were disabled prior to 2013, then you should still be able to qualify for benefits. This can happen for many disabled people, but we do see it happen a lot with veterans.
Shelly Mark: Definitely.
Natalia Jofre: Because they come back from being in service or they’re getting their own VA benefit and so they feel like, I don’t really need to do this, or they think I’m still going to be able to go back to work and then they usually have a couple of failed work attempts and they can’t. Can you sort of expand on that?
Shelly Mark: Sure. We see this a lot with veterans. I have a client now who was found to be disabled by the Veteran’s Administration back in 2007. He had already been out of work at that point but he was advised by someone not to file for Social Security because there would be some type of an offset, which you know based on our prior filmings that we’ve had, that’s not true, but he didn’t know that at the time. He just now filed in 2016, but because his date last insured was 2009, we’re able to use the evidence from the VA’s findings from 2007. So in that situation, because his date last insured was 2009, even though he filed in 2016, we can still fight to have the claim approved, but we can only use evidence that is prior to 2009. Prior to that date last insured. But as long as there’s sufficient evidence during that time frame to find him disabled, then Social Security will still have to pay them.
Natalia Jofre: So, what we’ll talk about in our next blog, because I want you to sort of really sink this information in, is when we’re talking about evidence, what kind of evidence do you need to prove your case in general, but more importantly prior to your date last insured.
Shelly Mark: Definitely.
Natalia Jofre: Let’s do that and we’ll focus on that.
Shelly Mark: That sounds good.
Natalia Jofre: Okay good. So in the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to visit our website or call our office.
Shelly Mark: Thank you.
