Dont let VA pull a fast one on you!!! NOT ONE EFFECTIVE DATE WAS CORRECT!

[broncovet]

Disclaimer:  There are many, many great VA employees who are Veteran friendly and grant the Veteran every benefit the law allows the first time.  And, there are also many great VSO's who are amazing help.  This advice does not apply to them.  It applies to the "other" VA employees who are not so Veteran friendly and also not so good VSO's.  Its a lottery and you dont know which one(s) you will get.   

 Ok, so you "made it".  VA denied Service connection, you appealed and won.  Done?  Not so fast!   Now, the VA's next plan is to lowball your rating percentage.  Ok, so yu beat that one and you are done right?  Nope.  There is still one more way for VA to hoodwink you.  You are so excited, you get a check and regular payments coming in.  HurraY!  You forget or dont bother to check to see if the effective date is right.   Its so easy for VA to hornswaggle your effective date.  In fact, I got a total of 3 decisions awarding benefits and EVERY one had the wrong effective date.  I appealed 2, and won, and the other one I should have appealed, but did not.  Its too late now but I still won additional benefits mostly because of the other 2 appeals which I won, had a net effect of winning benefits even on the claim I did not appeal, based on the terrible advice of a VSO.  

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Dont appeal your decision..you got an award, even tho its at 0 percent, because you could lose benefits. 

Huh?  How can my benefits go down from 0 percent?  CAn VA benefits be "negative"?  Is there a Negative 10 percent rating?  NO such thing!  

Here is a good example of ONE way the VA is attempting to hornswaggle this Vets benefits:

 

Edited July 3 by broncovet

[Vync]

Good info.

And also consider that when the veteran learns of either a lowball rating percentage and/or potential to get an earlier effective date (previously denied, filed again, granted years later), it ends up subject to the CUE criteria.

If the VA would include a copy of the C&P exam DBQ/results and the relevant laws/regs/rating criteria, then they could quickly and easily look for themselves. The 48 hour window for VSO staff to review claims before becoming final was removed. However, a vet could then easily take this information to their VSO and hopefully have it double-checked.

Maybe one day the one year appeal limit window and the strict CUE restrictions should be completely removed retroactively for all vets. They would fight hard against it and claim the backlog would get worse, but it would help prevent vets from getting shafted by an overly complex system.