Today we're gonna talk about the VA Form 9.
It is your formal appeal to the Board of Veterans' Appeals for disability benefits claims in
the VA system.
My name is Zack Evans, I work at Woods & Woods Attorneys in Evansville, Indiana, and I practice
in the area of veterans' benefits.
The VA Form 9 is intended to escalate the matter from the regional office, which is
the matter of service connection or the issue of the propriety of your rating, or the issue
of even unemployability.
So it takes those issues and then elevates them to a body known as the Board of Veterans'
Appeals, the Board of Veteran's Appeals being the decision-making body over the regional
offices that reviews their decisions for adjudicative accuracy.
Let's start off talking a little bit, doing a review of the VA claims process.
We do veterans' benefit appeals and you've begun a new claim, likely.
And after a period of time, the regional office will issue what's known as a rating decision.
And that is a quick look at your claim and your theory for how your condition should
be service-connected or why your rating should be higher than it already is, and they will
issue a decision on that.
So, after the rating decision is sent to you, you have one year to submit your Notice of
Disagreement, also colloquially known as a NOD.
Once you file your NOD, which is your Notice of Disagreement with the rating decision.
So you say, "VA, I deserve this benefit."
And the VA says, "No, you don't deserve this benefit."
You file the Notice of Disagreement saying that that's an incorrect decision, and then
the regional office is supposed to issue to you what is know as Statement of the Case.
We call that an SOC.
At this stage is where your Form 9 comes into play.
So you have your substantive appeal, you have a timeline in which you have to submit that
to the regional office.
And it is the later of two dates.
So you have either 60 days from the date that the VA mails you the Statement of the Case,
your SOC, or one year from when the regional office mailed the Notice of Disagreement to
you.
You have the same rule on timeframe to submit after a Supplemental Statement of the Case,
an SSOC.
There's an important thing to note here, though, is that in the vast majority of cases that
we handle here at this office, the wait time for a Statement of the Case due to the VA
backlog on benefits claims is extremely protracted.
The safe bet here is to send it in as soon as possible with an eye towards 60 days.
You don't want to rely on that later of the two with the one year from the NOD being sent
from the regional office.
Often times, by the time our clients receive their Statement of the Case, that one year
from the NOD mailing date has long-since run.
There's an exception with filing your Form 9 on simultaneous contested claims.
That's where if two people are fighting over the same VA benefit, and one person would
win or receive the benefit to the detriment of the other person and they would lose, you
only have 30 days to appeal with a Form 9 on those types of cases.
But in most cases, where you're just looking at claiming a benefit.
You're claiming service connection.
You're claiming an increased rating.
You're claiming that all of your service-connected conditions render you unemployable, you're
still looking, you're looking at the 60 days or one year, the later of the two.
Again, I would encourage you to send your appeal in as soon as possible with an eye
towards the 60 days.
So a substantive appeal on your Form 9 should mirror your Statement of the Case for the
issues that you want to appeal.
So when you look at your SOC that's sent to you by the regional office and you're going
to fill out your Form 9 on the issues that you were denied on the Statement of the Case,
you want to make sure that you're matching those, you at least have an accounting of
all of those.
So you don't want to leave off items on your Form 9 that appeared on your Statement of
the Case, because if you intended to continue to fight those issues and you leave them off
the Form 9, your claim's gonna die.
And it's not gonna move on to the Board of Veterans' Appeals for further consideration.
You can receive what's known as a good cause extension for your Form 9 filing date, however
it's not recommended.
The VA has significant latitude in whether or not they can grant these extensions for
your Form 9 timeline.
And denials at the court of Veterans' Appeals, they're very difficult to achieve and that's
because of the latitude the VA has.
And the only way that you can get those denials for your good cause extensions overturned
is if you can show an abuse of discretion at that level, which is very difficult to
do.
So again, I would encourage you to file your Form 9 in as timely a manner as possible,
as soon as possible, with an eye towards 60 days.
If you have any questions about your substantive appeal, your Form 9, questions about your
case in total, please contact us.
This is what we do.
This is our area of expertise, we'd be more than happy to look at your case and help you
out and see if we can get you the right answer.