The common mistake made by Federal and Postal Workers in preparing a Federal disability retirement application, submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is in failing to coordinate the necessary elements in preparing the case, and instead focusing exclusively upon the seriousness of the medical condition itself.  This is a natural course of events, of course, if only because of the focus upon the “disability” aspect of the administrative process, which would lead one to conclude that it is the medical condition which must be of singularly defining significance in the application procedures.

However, such a focus can result in the disarming effect of assuming that seriousness of the medical condition itself will qualify the Federal and Postal Worker in attaining the goal sought:  An approval from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.  But this is precisely why so many Federal Disability Retirement applications fail to be approved at the First Stage of the process – because the reliance and focus becomes narrowly and myopically targeted upon the medical condition itself, leading to the first and most substantive mistake made in preparing a Federal Disability Retirement application, whether the Federal or Postal Worker is under the old system (Civil Service Retirement System, or CSRS) or relegated to the newer system (Federal Employees Retirement System, or FERS).

Two primary difficulties emerge when the Federal or Postal employee first begins to contemplate filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits.  First, the potential Federal Disability Retirement applicant sees and experiences the medical condition, and begins to recognize that the medical condition is impacting one’s ability/inability to perform at an acceptable level in one or more of the essential elements of his or her job.  So far, so good.  Then, secondly, because the Federal or Postal employee who suffers from the medical condition, is obviously the same individual who will be filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, that individual is often unable to objectively separate him or herself as the suffering individual, from the one who must convey to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management the severity and extent of the impact upon one’s inability to perform all of the essential elements of one’s job.  Thus, the problematic conundrum of the subject’s inability to bifurcate the objectivity of one’s own medical condition from the subjective experience of the medical condition, which begins to manifest itself.

One way in which the Federal or Postal employee attempts to compensate for this inability to be “objective” in the preparation, formulation and filing of one’s own Federal Disability Retirement application, is by blindly signing the Standard Form 3112C (Physician’s Statement) and handing it to the doctor with the simple instruction of:  “Please complete this and send it in to my H.R.”   By doing so, the Federal or Postal employee sees himself as being dispassionate and detached in delegating to the treating physician the task of preparing a comprehensive medical report.  Such delegation of preparing that which constitutes the very essence and lynchpin of a Federal Disability Retirement application is, at best, a foolhardy act of blind confidence.  And the second way of dealing in such an entirely deficient approach is to provide a Statement of Disability on Standard Form 3112A with a focal emphasis about how debilitating one’s own medical condition is, along with attached print-outs from a laborious computer search on the medical symptoms and descriptions of the medical condition, googled, downloaded and indexed for OPM to review.  (By the way, just for the Reader’s information, OPM’s administrative adjudicators have internet access, too, in their Federal offices).  A subtext of this second “mistake” is when the Federal or Postal employee prepares his or her “statement of disability” without even reviewing what the treating doctor has sent in to the Human Resources specialist.

Read full article by Attorney Robert R. McGill