Reply to Board of Veterans Appeals (Attorney Advisor)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is not 80 percent of all Board decisions but 80 percent that are appealed to the Court.  Decisions are not automatically appealed and many people do not appeal at all.

Also, this study was prior to the enactment of AMA. The AMA has changed everything because the Board does not have a duty to assist under AMA.[/quote]

This is correct, but the situation also is not exactly rosy. Only things that are appealed to the Court count here, and you cannot appeal a full grant or a remand, which is a very large percent of Board decisions. Historically, the percent of Board decisions appealed to the Court has been about 8% of the total of everything issued regardless of whether it contains a denial or not, though I believe it may have nudged upwards a bit in recent years. Maybe 10% now.

However, for that 10% things are pretty dire. The Court's annual reports show the outcomes for everyone to see: https://www.uscourts.cavc.gov/documents/FY2024AnnualReport.pdf. In FY24, out of 7862 appeals decided, 6531 were kicked back in some manner, which is 83%. If the Board issues 118,000 decisions in a year, and 10% of those are appealed to the Court, and of those 83% are kicked back, that's an extra 9,794 decisions that need to be issued. According to the Board's FY24 annual report, the Board's cost per case is $2405. That's just the cost of the Board issuing a single decision. So, the Court's kickbacks alone are costing the Board approximately $23.5m/year to adjudicate. And that's not counting the cost of the Court litigation itself to VA, which means VA General Counsel staff and EAJA payments. I suspect if you added all that up, the current Court remand rate is costing VA something in excess of $100m/year. The Board's requested budget for FY26 is $277m. So, we're looking at a situation where the quality situation is costing VA the equivalent of about 1/3 of the Board's entire budget.[/quote]

The problem is a lot of the "errors" make no difference.  The Board failed to discuss one instance of tingling pain in the arm and the person gets a JMR but that one instance of pain makes absolutely no difference in the rating.  Or the Board failed to get medical records from 1984 that are related to back problem when the claim is for blood pressure.  The Court will call an error and return it to the Board for a new decision and pay an attorney, but these "errors" are not actual quality problems. The only purpose is to make money for a law firm in Rhode Island.  Then they make You Tube videos lamenting the horrible decisions like and wondering why it takes VA so long to issue a new decision that makes no difference.  They are shysters of ths hughest order. You know which firm.[/quote]

Okay, but any one who has worked at the court knows that a lot of BVA decisions have substantive quality issues. [/quote]

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