VA Disability - Page 5

When you begin the VA claim process with the purpose of proving your eligibility for veterans benefits, you’ll first need to establish that your service meets the VA’s requirements of being active duty in a branch of the military or other military capacity. Once you’ve successfully met these two requirements, you’ll have to pass a final criterion: determining the character of your discharge.

The VA states that anyone establishing veteran status for the purpose of receiving benefits must have been discharged “under conditions other than dishonorable.” This might seem simple at first – but unfortunately, the VA’s discharge categories do not match up with the military’s discharge categories.

How Does the VA Claims Process Define Military Service?

When it comes to the VA claims process, you must be “a person who served in the active military, naval, or air service, and who was discharged or released therefrom under conditions other than dishonorable” to establish basic eligibility. The first step that either your VA disability lawyer or the VA Board will take in establishing your benefit eligibility will be to examine whether your experience qualifies as military service.

Conventional service in one of the five branches of the US Armed Forces is the most common type of military service. If you served with the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, or Coast Guard, you’ll meet the military service requirement.

What Are the Eligibility Requirements for Successful VA Claims?

When starting the process of making VA claims, it’s important to first determine whether you meet the eligibility requirements for receiving veterans benefits. All VA benefit programs require that anyone applying meet three basic criteria used to determine whether he or she be classified as a veteran.

A good VA disability lawyer can be an incredibly useful ally when trying to obtain veterans’ benefits. Even though the VA is required by law to provide you with free help on your claim, their definition of “help” can often be lacking. Most veterans say they don’t really understand what is going on with their claims and where they are in the process at any given time.

An experienced VA disability lawyer can make sure that you understand the veterans claims process and receive correct and complete information on your rights and responsibilities, and he or she can advocate on your behalf to push your claim forward.

Most veterans don’t even think about talking to a VA disability attorney at first. After all the VA is there to help them, right? In fact, there are even laws and rules in place that say the VA is required to help you with your claim. Why would you pay someone when they do it for you free of charge?

But there’s a reason that veterans’ attorneys exist, and after dealing with the VA for a while, many veterans understand this all too well. Despite the law, there are many ways that the VA can get around or even blatantly ignore their responsibilities, and even when they are arguably behaving as they should, claims take forever. A typical claim in 2006 took more than 127 days for the VA to make a decision on it – up 11 days from just three years before!

The VA claims process is a long and winding path, with emphasis on the length. Initial processing took an average of 127 days in 2006, a timeframe that has surely increased since them. And that’s not even counting appeals fighting denial of veterans benefits, or other things that can drag the process out for years. Why does it take so long? Some of this is due to the people in the system being overburdened and under-trained, but there are also a number of legally required steps that every claim must go through.

Unfortunately, the Department of Veterans Affairs takes a very long time when processing VA claims. In 2006, the average time to process a VA claim through regional offices was 127 days. More than four months! How horrible would it be to wait four months only to be denied veterans benefits?

This isn’t a new problem, either. A VA employee testified to the GAO about veterans claims in 2002, saying that it was a long-standing issue and that “this isn’t a problem that snuck up on them.” The VA is well aware that veterans of World War II are dying at a high rate while they try to wait out delays in processing their VA claims.