Board of Veterans Appeals

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

I want to talk a little bit about the board of veterans appeals. I’m specifically talking about the board post AMA. The AMA is the appeals modernization act. If you don’t know what that is, please go see an earlier video I recorded about how to tell if your claim is in the old system or the new system. The Board of Veterans Appeals as part of the Department of Veterans Affairs. But it is separate from all the other parts of the VA, like the Veterans Health Administration, and more importantly, for disability claims purposes, the Veterans Benefits Administration. With that separation comes independence. So how independent are they? On paper, quite a bit. The Chairman of the Board reports directly to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. So it’s about as independent as you can be and still be inside the VA. However, I do realize that when you get a bad decision back from the Board, it doesn’t always feel like they’re so independent.

So how do you get your claim in front of the Board? For the most part, you can appeal any initial decision, higher-level review, or supplemental claim straight to the board. You cannot appeal a board decision back to the board. There is another set of circumstances where a case can be remanded from the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims and ended up back at the Board on its way back down. But that’s a separate set of circumstances that we’re really not going to get into here.

So what happens to your claim when it’s actually at the Board? Well, the board is made up of Veterans Law Judges, one of whom will review your claim. Now that VLJ is a lawyer and he, or she has a staff of other lawyers to assist them in reviewing each claim. This is the first level where you’re going to have lawyers looking at your claim, at least on the VA side. So if you are working with your claim yourself and presenting arguments before the board, just know that you have to persuade a judge with a trained legal staff. So that means you’re going to have to point to the law that the VA was supposed to follow, explain how they didn’t follow it, and how that led to the wrong decision in your claim.

Prior favorable findings are binding on the board. I do have a separate video about favorable findings. You should check that out if you’re curious. Aside from favorable findings, the board is required to review your claim de novo. That is a Latin phrase. I don’t know why lawyers to these lab phrases, but we do. What it means, in basic terms, is that the board is supposed to review your claim with totally fresh eyes. They’re not to give any weight to the decision made by the regional office. They don’t have to ignore the decision from the regional office, but they can’t give it any weight.

The board does not have a duty to assist you with your claim. So what is likely going to happen if the board finds that there was a duty to assist error is they’re just going to kick it back to the regional office and tell them to try again and fix it. One exception to that is if it’s possible for the Board to grant you the maximum benefit under the claim that you’re seeking based on all the information that is currently available to the board, even with that duty to assist error. In that case, the board can, and in fact, should go ahead and grant you that maximum benefit. Do they do it all the time? I think not often enough. There are probably more that they should grant that way.

I hope you found this post helpful. If you’d like me to help you with your disability claim, please reach out to me using the contact information on this website.