Regional Office and VA Tactics to Defeat or Sabotage Your Service
Connected Claim:
1. Should a veteran write a congressman or senator - an elected politician?
RO's are so powerful and independent that the VA in Washington, DC cannot
control them. Most congressmen or senators have limited staffs so they are at
the mercy of the information provided by the RO. When a veteran writes a
politician and identifies a problem, the politician writes the VA and asks them
to respond to the problem. The RO's have several standard responses to
politicians: (1) the appealed claim is being decided right now and the veteran
will have to wait in line; or (2) the veteran or his attorney failed to appeal
or do something the RO asked the veteran to do so the veteran has no claim. Then
the politician will write the veteran and say something like, "I am so
glad I could help you solve this matter. Please contact my office at any time."
The only value in writing a politician is document continuing problems at the RO
or VA and not for individual help. Most politicians cannot get the RO's to help
an individual veteran.
2. Many Regional Offices ("RO") have "mail rooms" that lose or delay
your letters causing your claim to be dismissed. ALWAYS send all of your
documents to the RO by CERTIFIED MAIL - RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED. Then if the RO
claims your claim was not timely, you can prove it was timely since many
subsequent appeals allow the postmark date as the RO filed date.
3. RO Adjudication Teams may "narrow" your claim to the least expensive
possible. Most veterans with hearing loss also have medically documented
tinnitus or ringing in the ears caused by the noise trauma in the military
experience. RO's love to drop claims or "sidetrack" them with selective reading.
If your claim was for anxiety, do not allow the RO to narrow that claim to PTSD.
4. Many veterans do not understand the payment system for ratings so they do
not know if they are being paid for the correct rating and for the right number
of dependents. The Winston Salem RO is quite clever at paying a service
connected veteran at the "single" rate rather than for "veteran and spouse". I
estimate this RO tactic applies to 20 percent of veterans who receive benefits.
To check your benefits, go to:
VA Monthly Service Connected
Benefits Payments Chart or
www.vba.va.gov/bln/21/Rates
5. Recently, the RO's have begun the delaying process of challenging the
veteran's Notice of Disagreement (NOD) to the initial Rating decision with
"We-don't-understand-what-you-mean-so-tell-us-more-precisely. Always challenge
any misstatement in the RO's communication with you. The RO Tactic here is to
claim that the veteran abandoned his claim since he or she did not respond to
some minor inquiry from the RO. File another NOD for such RO letters. In fact,
any RO letter containing misleading or incorrect information should be responded
to with a Notice of Disagreement (NOD) from the veteran.
6. Always demand that the RO send you your complete C-File when you order it. RO's require the least paid employees to copy C-Files and these overworked
employees detest such copying tasks. Even if the entire C-File is demanded,
there is a significant chance that the files provided by RO will be out-of-order
or incomplete.
7. The RO's love to schedule a veteran for a Compensation and Pension (C&P)
on the shortest notice possible - usually several days notice for the veteran to
drive hundreds of miles to be at an early morning medical examination (The RO
pays nothing towards your expenses, of course). Call your Congressional member
to protest such tactics - immediately. Always send a certified mail -return
receipt request letter to the RO demanding a rescheduled C&P exam.
8. Whenever a veteran receives a Supplemental Statement of the Case (SSOC),
the veteran should always file both an NOD plus a VA9 appeal to the BVA for all
issues. The reason for this is that if the RO adds a new issue to the SSOC, the
proper appeal process is for the veteran to file an NOD. To be on the safe side,
the veteran should appeal any SSOC with both an NOD and a VA9.
9. Getting the Winston Salem RO to acknowledge and date-stamp a document copy
submission is very difficult. I usually provided self-addressed and stamped
envelopes to make the process convenient and cost effective to the RO, but the
RO would not comply. Instead, they saved my envelopes and then mailed me RO
documents like Rating Decisions, Statements of the Case, and other letters in
my envelopes. Of course, these envelopes had no postmarked date
(since the RO has its own post office) and RO officials would delay the RO
mailing (in my envelope) up to a month or more after the date of the RO document
so that the appeal time period had run or was about to run by the time I
received the RO document. I finally complained to the Postal Inspector in
Winston Salem and the Postal Inspector promptly found that the RO did nothing
wrong. At least the RO stopped the practice for a while each time I contacted
the Postal Inspector.
visitors since October 25, 2006
If
you seek a single practitioner attorney dedicated to achieving
veterans
VA benefits and
Social Security disability benefits, I welcome your
contacting my office. All attorney fee contracts with clients are
contingent upon my winning past due awards and my attorney fees are
twenty percent for VA cases and
twenty-five percent for Social Security
cases - my fee contracts are posted on
this web site. My contracts comply with the United States Code and are
approved by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security
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Hugh Cox