New FOIA Process Advice-C-File

[rootbeer22]

Folks:

The last time I did a FOIA (7 months ago), the entire disability process for me stopped for me at the Regional Office level. So, now I understand that there's only a couple of locations instead of the local RO that a Vet  sends a FOIA to now. So, can someone now please educate me the best way or process  to request a FOIA to  get  a digital copy of my entire C-File? I'm starting the process of doing my NOD now for my first claim and want to see what records were used to determine my claim service connections and also the denials.

Anyway, I appreciate your help in advance....Rootbeer22

 

 

[Gastone]

Buck, I just tried the RO Walk-in Viewing about 2 weeks ago at my Det RO.. Was at the RO for Voc Rehab/IL meeting and had some time to burn. Just wanted to get a grip on the C-File Viewing process & requirements.

As it turns out, my C-File now digitized, can be viewed by appointment only. When making the appointment, you must specify that you will want to make copies of certain pages. The appointment is necessary, I totally agree with this, so that a VA Employee can be pulled from other daily duties, to be with the Vet during the entire viewing process and to make the requested copies. All this seems reasonable, especially if the C-Files were still on paper. Oversight of the Viewing is a must.

If you've ever had occasion to view Civil Court case paper files, all viewing is supervised. You give the clerk a list of pages that you want to purchase copies of.

Semper Fi

[Buck52]

Roger that Gastone..when I finally did get to view it  they watched me like a hawk  was  very hard to concentrate on what I was looking for.

I am glad the C-file's are being digitized  I got mine in on Monday of this week

The C-FILE CD came as a single PDF File - All content was scanned and placed into a single Adobe Acrobat file (.PDF) - which was nothing but images; being they were scanned.  Fortunately, I had purchased a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional and it has the feature to take the PDF and search the images for text recognition characters and gave me the ability to search the PDF file as a text file - the only downside is it does not understand majority of handwriting, but does pick up some that is neatly written. 

This sure makes it  easier to find  things.

 I have  All this information  in my lap-top and the orginal CD-rom I put up for safe keeping.

.......Buck

[Gastone]

Buck, was everything scanned in chronological order? As I recall, seemed like my Paper C-File 01/14, was somewhat haphazard date wise.

Sounds like the Acrobat Pro is the way to go.

Semper Fi

[Buck52]

No Actually it was all mixed up  with duplicates on some records  and about every 15th page they had the Disabilities Rating sheet to show current disabilities and the dates of rating and how incurred and where.

I rescanned the Disk into my lap top,&use the Pro AB Reader  for finding things fast, when you use that program it  uses optical search format...meaning you can type in a word  like rating decisions  or a date  say 1998 And it finds all this information  all you do is just scroll down to what you need...makes it soooo much easier.

but using this program it don't pick up hand written notes..it will if it's neatly written out and in dark ink or pencil..but all type documents it picks up.

And its PDF Friendly..I Absolutely Love it.