The Social Security Administration wants to be completely paperless and over the past several years has focused on eliminating paper in disability benefits processing. While it is now scanning millions of pages of documents daily, it so far isn't significantly reducing what can be a yearlong wait for disability benefits, according to Thomas Grzymski, deputy assistant commissioner of enterprise support for the SSA.

Disability benefit processing involves multiple parties and reports from medical providers such as doctors and hospitals, which can result in files that are inches thick. The paperless project has cut about a week off that processing time, mostly as a result of eliminating the need for mail. But the agency believes that weeks of processing time could be saved as electronic scanning, which now covers as much as 60 percent of the disability-related paperwork, and other process improvements take hold. Much is still on paper, Grzymski said, but "everything that is new is going paperless."