I’m going to talk about claim streams. Think of claim streams as the path of each individual claim you’ve made as it goes from the initial decision to whenever you stop appealing.
As I’m sure you are well aware, when you get a decision back from the VA, you have options for what you do next if you are not satisfied with the VA’s decision. Those options differ a little bit depending on the specific decision you’re dealing with but they include a higher-level review, supplemental claim, appeal to the Board of Veterans Appeals, and an appeal to the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.
Let’s say you file an initial claim where you list say 7 different disabilities and the VA comes back and denies all of them. For some of these claims, there is no more evidence that you have to add, but you are confident that the VA failed in its duty to assist or made some other legal error. That’s something best be fixed with a higher-level review or an appeal to the BVA.
Some of the other claims, however, you know you could get better evidence. Maybe you need to get a few more buddy statements, or maybe you need to get a medical opinion from a doctor. You should deal with those claims by filing a supplemental claim.
So you’re in a situation where you want to request a higher-level review on some disabilities, and you know you need to file supplemental claims on the others, so what do you do? Split them. It’s fine. Send some down a supplemental claim lane and some down the higher-level review lane. You can send some to the BVA too. Remember though, that you must file new and relevant evidence for every claim listed in a supplemental claim. So if you can’t get new evidence, or point the VA to new evidence, don’t use the supplemental claim lane.
When your list of claims splits up and your start appealing things in different ways, those are claims streams. This can be a pain to keep track of. If you are doing it all in your head, stop doing that. Get some paper, write down each claim, write down the date of the last decision, the specific method you used to appeal that decision, and the date you appealed. Obviously, not everything you do is technically an “appeal” but forgive my shorthand.
You can also combine your disabilities again later. Let’s say you file your higher-level review and your supplemental claim at the same time and you get a decision on both within one year of each other, you could put them all back together for one BVA appeal. If it made sense to do that.
The summary point here is just to know that each disability can take its own unique path through the appeals process. It doesn’t have to, but it can. I say it a lot, every veteran’s claims are different, and there is no cookie-cutter, one size fits all answer. You have to do what makes the most sense for your specific situation.
As always, I hope you found this helpful. If you want me to help you with your disability claim, feel free to reach out to me through my website