"Welcome Home" from Veterans' Advocate Jim Strickland will help vets from Iraq and Afghanistan navigate the VA system.

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Veterans' Advocate Jim Strickland provides regular columns for VA Watchdog dot Org.  If you would like to contact Jim about his columns, you can email him here...  The archive of Jim's articles is here...  To find an answer to a specific VA benefits question, use the VA Watchdog search engine... click here...  And, be sure to use Jim's:  A Military Veterans Guide To Disability Compensation and Pension Benefits -- A Compendium of Resources and Knowledge For The Disabled Veteran -- click here...   JIm's series for new vets, "Welcome Home," is also featured on Military.com. And, you can follow Jim on TWITTER here ...

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Welcome Home! #3 -- Letters from the VA

by Jim Strickland

In a previous article (Welcome Home! #2 -- Getting Started) I alerted you to anticipate that after you've filed for your disability compensation with VA that, "You'll receive mailings from VA...".

The first piece of mail you should receive will be a notice that your Regional Office (or Veterans Service Center) has received your application for benefits. In that initial correspondence you'll see that a C-File (Case-File) number has been assigned.

You'll want to make note of that C-File number. In the future, when you correspond with your Veterans Benefits Administration that number should be clearly written on every page of every document you mail to them.

It will help you to understand that the VA, particularly the VBA, is a paper driven machine. While the organization has made numerous attempts to jump into the computer age, there's been almost no progress. We're not here today to discuss why that is but to recognize that paper files are our reality and that's what we have to deal with.
Your file, along with hundreds of thousands of others, will be pushed from station to station during its processing in a grocery cart, stacked up in a cardboard box.

It's your job to assist the VA with its task by keeping close track of your records and staying organized. If you do your part, the VBA will have an easier time with adjudication of your claim.

As you receive letters from the VA, open them and read them immediately. Many functions of the disability claims process are considered to have a "timely" restriction. If you don't respond appropriately by a timely deadline, the VA may default to an adverse action against your claim. Once this occurs, it takes a much greater effort to set the situation straight again.

Almost all mailings from VA will contain instructions on what you must do in response. These extra enclosures may be brief and simple or run to a dozen or more pages of complex legalese. In every case, it's to your benefit to read the letters until you understand what you're to do.

You may get letters over time that tell you, "We're sorry for the delays. We are working on your case." Those letters are randomly generated by a computer program and mean very little. The good news is that you'll know that you aren't completely forgotten in the maze.

You may also get a letter that seems to ask you for evidence. All too often it will ask you for evidence you can't come up with (buddy letters or records that don't exist) and each time you receive one of those you'll wonder if they received anything you've already sent.

You'll get a few mailings like that because VA has a "duty to assist"
the veteran with the claim. The mailings are one of the ways that VA believes it meets the obligation. The additional letters reminding you to send in evidence are there to inform you of exactly what you must do to win your claim.

If you're sure that you've completed your part of the bargain you can safely ignore the letters after you've read them to ensure that you don't miss anything. Although these routine reminders aren't important to your case, save them in your files just like everything else.

Along the way your VBA may notify you that you must complete and return a VA form before they may proceed. Often enough this may be a form that gives them permission to request medical records from a non-VA provider. Be sure that you've completed and returned all such data to VA and made detailed copies for your own records.

One of the elements that will win your award for benefits is evidence.
Once you've established that you are a veteran and that you have a disabling condition, the only thing left to prove is that the condition is service connected and disabling to a given degree.

When VA corresponds with you and asks for evidence, you must think about what evidence to return to the RO for placement in your C-File.

The best of evidence is usually found in a medical record. Injuries or illnesses (conditions) are usually well documented with the nature of the event causing the condition(s) noted.

The extent of the condition, the treatments used and the recovery are also most often in the notes written by a medic, a doctor or a nurse.
Long term recovery is usually well documented with physical therapy routines or other long term needs verified.

If your medical record is DOD or VA, the VBA RO working your claim will usually have no problems location and retrieving copies of those files. This is a good time for you to get your own copies too. You have an absolute right to all of your medical files except that some mental health files may be restricted from your view. Mental health professionals will sometimes believe that it's in your own best interest to not view that record and you'll have to petition and appeal to get that record.

If your records are civilian, you should be sure that VA has your permission to retrieve them but you must also do that for yourself.

While the VBA has a duty to assist you in getting those records, that duty has limits. The VBA may only send a simple request once or make one follow-up telephone call to where the records reside and if they run into barriers, they won't keep trying. Some civilian hospitals today don't keep medical records in-house but have contracted with other businesses to store your records elsewhere. These businesses can charge by the page and other wise make it a challenge to get the records VA needs to adjudicate your case.

If you don't pursue this for yourself, get the records and copy them to the VA, it's entirely possible that you could lose your case because VA never saw the most important doctor's note.

It's well worth the time for you to be sure it's done right.

Other evidence that may be helpful are "Statements In Support of Claim" documents, also sometimes called "buddy letters". These statements are best completed by eyewitnesses to an event that caused your condition or senior NCOs and officers who know what happened and when. Company or unit or ship's records, newspaper articles and even photographs may be good evidence to submit to support your claim.

Eventually your correspondence with VA will wind down to the point you'll receive a VCAA notice. the VCAA Notice is a notice signed by you telling the VA to go ahead and finalize a claim and that you have no more evidence to submit. Once you receive your VCAA papers, it's up to you to decide whether you need more time or if you're ready for VA to move ahead to adjudication of your claim.

No matter what you've heard, winning your earned and deserved VA disability compensation award isn't an impossibly difficult task.

If you have a legitimate health condition that was caused or exacerbated by your honorable service and you pay close attention to the details and requirements that VA communicates to you, you'll be marching far ahead of the pack.

Always remember that there are no shortcuts, cross every t and dot every i as you play strictly by the VA's rules and you're much more likely to come up an early winner.

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TOPICS: veterans, veterans' benefits, VA, Department of Veterans' Affairs, Jim Strickland, Veterans' Advocate, Welcome Home, Iraq veteran, Afghanistan veteran