Disability Claims

I want to quickly review the VA’s duty to assist you in developing your disability claim. Now, I need to say up front that I’m only talking about the VA’s regional office decisions. I’m specifically not talking about anything that’s pending before the Board of Veterans Appeals or the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. I’m only focused on the regional office and I need to note that a regional office doesn’t necessarily mean the regional office close to you, but I’m getting off track.

When you submit a claim to the VA for disability benefits, the VA has an obligation to assist you in developing that claim. That’s known as the duty to assist. But assistance can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. What the VA’s actually going to do for you is very limited. And it basically revolves around three things.

First, the VA is going to tell you, or is supposed to tell you if you fill out the forms wrong, if there’s missing information, they’re going to let you know. The second thing is that they’re going to tell you what evidence you need in order to prove the claims that you’ve made. Most of the time, that evidence is medical evidence, or it’s a statement of some kind, or it’s something from your military records. Then the third thing is the VA has to tell you what evidence they are going to get for you and what evidence you have to go get for yourself.

Now, typically what the VA is gonna do for you is limited to tracking down medical records, tracking down service records, and scheduling you for an examination for medical opinion.

Now, how hard is the VA is going to work to gather that evidence for you? It depends. Sometimes the VA does a really good job. Sometimes they totally drop the ball. The problem for you is that you don’t know if they’re going to drop the ball until you get the decision back. And when it lists the evidence that the VA considered and you see something important is missing. And now when that happens, you’re caught up in this appeal stage where at a minimum, you’ve got to submit a supplemental claim, if not go for a higher level review, or even seek recourse through the board of veterans appeals. And that takes a long time. It’s best to avoid that. The best thing for you to do is just take ownership of your claim. If you know that something is important, get on top of it, get the information yourself, make sure you send it to the VA, and get it in front of that person at the regional office, who’s making the decision. That’s the best thing you can do now. It’s not a slam dunk. The VA still makes mistakes, but that increases your odds of getting the right decision the first time.

If you want help doing that sort of thing, give me a call.

So it doesn’t matter what your disability is or how many disabilities you have. There are three things that you have to prove. If you want the VA to pay you disability benefits.

The first thing is you have to have a disability right now. And a disability is really just a physical or mental condition. I like to describe it as something that used to be fine, but now it’s not fine. It’s a very broad category. There are a lot of things that qualify as disabilities. The key is that you have to have the disability right now. One example I like to use is that if you injured your ankle while you were in the military, but it’s completely healed. So there’s no medical evidence of a current problem with your ankle, or you’re not feeling pain down there, then you don’t have a present disability in that ankle.

So the second thing you have to prove is that there was some event or illness that happened to you while you were in the military. Going back to the ankle analogy, any type of ankle injury is fine. It doesn’t even have to be sort of the classic, military injuries. You don’t have to get shot in war. You don’t have to have jumped out of an airplane and busted up your knee. Any injury counts, likewise with illnesses, if you got sick, that can count as well. The key is that this injury or this illness occurred while you were in the military.

The third thing you have to prove is that there is a connection between your current disability and that event that happened while you were in the military. And this is what the VA calls service connection. If your disability claim was denied and the VA said, this disability is not service-connected, that’s what they’re talking about. This third thing that you have to prove pretty much always requires medical evidence. Usually a medical opinion. A doctor has to say that this thing that happened to you in the military or this illness that you suffered in the military caused the disability you have now, or in the case of something pre-existing, it made that condition you have or disability you have worse than it would have been otherwise had you never served in the military. So those are the three things that the VA looks for.

Now, this is obviously a cursory overview. There’s a lot of subtlety and nuance and exceptions in each of those three things, but this is a good starting point. So when you start to think about your disability claim, think about what you need to prove and how you can prove each of those three things.