Rejected for federal disability benefits, unemployed workers who appealed to Judge David B. Daugherty in West Virginia last year had a change of luck: He approved every request he saw.

That record has spurred Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., ranking members of the Senate Finance Committee, to seek an investigation into whether unemployed Americans are cheating the system.

Lenient administrative judges may be viewing Social Security Disability Insurance payments “as an extension of unemployment benefits, rather than as a program to assist the truly disabled,” they told Social Security Inspector General Patrick O’Carroll Jr.

Allowing the unemployed to “exploit SSDI,” they wrote, would pass “enormous and crippling costs to taxpayers.”

Such talk worries Ward Harper, a Salt Lake City attorney who specializes in helping clients through the often years-long application for SSDI benefits. “In the near future, there is going to be a concerted effort to attack the disability system,” he predicts.

Since the recession began in 2007, an increasing number of unemployed Utahns have sought disability payments. And for the past year and a half, administrative judges have approved their payments at a rate higher than the rest of the nation, records show.

Applicants must prove they will be disabled for at least a year or have a terminal illness. In Utah and elsewhere, private contractors vet applications and initial appeals; further appeals go before administrative law judges who work for the Social Security Administration.

The agency is investigating Daugherty, who was suspended following a Wall Street Journal report last month that put a spotlight on the Huntington, W.Va.-based judge.

Hatch based his request for investigation on the newspaper’s report that 100 administrative judges nationwide are approving 90 percent or more of their cases, his spokeswoman, Julia Lawless, said Friday.

“These [judges] are saying that the initial denials were wrong 90 percent of the time,” she said. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

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Debating the costs » When applicants win disability payments, they receive an average of $1,067 a month, as of January 2011, according to a Social Security report.

Americans receiving disability payments get a lifetime average payout of $300,000, David Autor, a professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics department, estimated for the Wall Street Journal.

However, that figure includes Medicare coverage and Social Security payments all workers eventually receive.

Disability payments automatically convert to regular Social Security benefits at a person’s full retirement age. And while Medicare kicks in two years after disability benefits are approved, that coverage is available to all Americans at age 65.

Autor told The Salt Lake Tribune that the SSDI benefit accounted for 60 percent of his estimated total, or $180,000.