Why Insured Older Workers Have Quarters Without Wage Credits

be considered in determining the size of visitors’ work loads. Among the more important are the standards of work performance that an agency expects to maintain, the quality of staff, and the amount and kind of clerical services available to handle routine tasks. In addition, the number and types of eligibility factors that must be explored to determine eligibility for assistance, the frequency with which determinations of continued eligibility must be made, and the volume of applications in relation to cases receiving assistance have an important bearing on the number of cases a visitor can carry. In the last analysis, however, the weight that an individual administrator can give to these factors, either singly or collectively, is determined by the amount of money available to the agency for administration. The data on the number of cases per visitor are estimated and thus are subject to some margin of error. Most workers in most agencies carry case loads comprising different types of assistance cases; usually the amount of time required to handle an old-age assistance case is less than that for cases of aid to dependent children or general assistance. As a result, other things being equal, average case loads per visitor are likely to be higher in agencies that have a relatively large proportion of old-age assistance cases in their total case loads. In the tabulation shown below, agencies have been classified by the average number of assistance cases per visitor without regard to the types of programs administered. In the three agencies with average case loads per visitor of 300 or more, old-age assistance cases comprise from 75 to 90 percent of the total load. Among the four agencies at the other extreme-those in which the average case load is less than loo-are two that do not administer old-age assistance and two in which old-age assistance cases comprise less than half the total case load.