Catherine Bordbar v. Michael Astrue

MEMORANDUM

Cathrine Bordbar appeals the lower court’s judgment affirming the decision of the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration that she was not disabled within the meaning of the Social Security Act and thus was not entitled to disability benefits. We have jurisdiction, 28 U.S.C. § 1291 , and we affirm.

Bordbar asserts that the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) improperly relied upon testimony from a vocational expert (VE) that conflicted with the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). In a hypothetical question posed to the VE, the ALJ described someone limited to “one to two-step simple instruction kinds of jobs,” which parallels the language used to describe jobs at Reasoning Level One on the Scale of General Education Development set forth in the DOT, a standard reference for such questions. By using similar language, Bordbar argues that the ALJ intended to limit her to jobs at Reasoning Level One and that the VE improperly ignored this limitation when she testified that someone with such a limitation could perform jobs at Reasoning Levels Two or Three.

We need not determine whether the VE’s testimony conflicted with the limitations posed by the ALJ because…