Disability Retirement from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management: Concurrent Actions

Idioms often convey an underlying truth recognized and identified by a specific culture or population; they are statements from an experiential aggregation of similitude, based upon a shared set of values.  The phrase, “When it rains, it pours”, is easily a recognizable idiom; that when things go wrong, multiple wrong things tend to occur altogether, all at once.  It is somewhat of a tautology, as when “X is Y, X are Ys”.  But it is in the very pluralization of the outcome which makes the differentiation significant.

For Federal and Postal employees contemplating filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS or CSRS, the engagement of the administrative and bureaucratic process of preparing, formulating and filing for FERS Disability Retirement benefits rarely results in a vacuum.

Often (or perhaps one is forced to begin with the prefatory clause, “All too often”), the long and complex history of harassment, complaints, formal complaints, grievances, lawsuits, EEO filings, etc., precede the filing of a Federal Disability Retirement application, thereby complicating one’s Federal Disability Retirement application with much baggage, historical aggregation of enmity and acrimony, and creating a simple set of causal facts into a convoluted compendium of complexities.  All of a sudden, the soft sounds of rain turn into a downpour of ferocious flooding.

In such cases, in formulating one’s Federal Disability Retirement application, it is important to bifurcate the compounded complexities, and to simplify, streamline and segregate.  From the viewpoint of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the very agency which receives and decides upon all Federal Disability Retirement applications, the mixing of concurrent actions and issues merely complicates matters.

As we all do, we would prefer to hear the soft patter of rain, and not the thunderous mess of a downpour.  Even the plants in the garden recognize that.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Worker Disability Retirement: Historical Relevance

In preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS or CSRS, one must thoughtfully complete Standard Form 3112A — the “Applicant’s Statement of Disability“.

The questions asked on the form do not request, nor do they require, historical context — i.e., of “how” a medical condition or injury occurred, “when” it occurred (although it does ask the approximate date of the onset of disability, which is somewhat distinct from asking the question in the context of historical background; rather, it merely asks for a month and a year), or “what” happened.

History is a contextual aura, a conceptual construct which we carry with us wherever we are; of having an identity based upon one’s background, a sense of who we are, where we came from, and thereby providing a foundation of an understanding of why we are who we are in the present day.  The historicity of an individual, a culture, a society and a civilization is important in understanding the context as to the behavior, motivation, and teleological actions engaged in by an individual, a group, or a nation.

Thus, the old adage that those who fail to study history, are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.  But in the context of preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS or CSRS, one must always keep in mind that brevity, streamlining and respect for the limited time, attention-span and workload of the OPM Representative in reviewing a particular case, is important.  To that end, historical background should be guided by the standard of direct relevance to the essence of one’s case.

Reading about history is important; understanding history can be informative; listening to one’s personal history should be left mostly to the quietude of a family gathering, when grandpa has the time to retell ancient stories of those past glory days.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire