As a disabled veteran who does a lot of work with other veterans and their families for the past decade I have pointed many of them to the words and articles at The VA Watch Dog written and published by a friend named Larry Scott.
The website has been having server problems for about 2 weeks now and Larry has not been adding news articles except for a few headlines where he added a few words and links to where the news could be found, about the lack of a federal COLA for 2011 and a story about the VA "gagging" employees from talking to CNN reporters about "military sexual trauma".
Larry was able to get anonymous information from VA employees and he would then go public with it once he verified it was happening. Needless to say the Veterans Administration was not admirer of Larry Scotts.
To day Larry posted this
TO MY READERS: With great sadness I announce that VA Watchdog dot Org will cease publication. I am in failing health and can no longer maintain the site on a day-to-day basis. I must stress that my health issues are NOT service-connected in any way!
The site will remain active until, at least, February 1, 2011. Please use this time to search the site for information that may be of value to you and other veterans, and pass it on. And, remember to visit the sponsors' sites. They deserve your support.
The site server is still having some problems. Your emails are not getting through. So, if you wish to contact me, please use the following email address lscott7224@gmail.com or you may post a comment at the bottom of this page.
Veterans' Advocate Jim Strickland will continue his excellent work. I encourage you to visit Jim's sites. Jim's Q&A feature will be moving to his A-to-Z guide to VA disability benefits site, here: http://www.jimstrickland912.com/ . Jim's veterans' discussion board is here: http://www.straighttalkforveterans.com/ . Also, Jim will be writing for Stateside Legal, an organization that provides help to veterans and military members ... their site is here: http://statesidelegal.org/ .
It's been my honor to serve you for more than five years. Thank you for your support. And, thanks to all of those who worked behind the scenes to make the site possible ... you know who you are. May God Bless you. And, may God Bless our Great Country.
Larry Scott, Founder & Editor, VA Watchdog dot Org (10-25-10)
I also admire the work that Jim Strickland has been doing for veterans for many years, thru his writing for Larry Scott and thru his website Straight Talk for Veterans Jim believes as I do that the best advocate a veteran can have for their compensation claim with the VA is for the veteran to do it themselves. It is their claim and to hand it over to a Service Officer (SO) at any of the authorized Veteran Service Organizations (VSO) is to just sign over your Power of Attorney to an over worked SO that does not care if your claim is approved or denied their only goal is to get it off their desk.
They do not return phone calls, I have never met one yet that will give you an e mail address so that you can contact them in this digital world, they still behave as if it is 1945 and the claims files are all still done in paper. My personal claim file called a "C File" is moved in 6 boxes that are 2 feet in length, it has been mailed to Washington DC and back to Columbia SC when I appealed my cardiac issue to the Board of Veteran Appeals.
All of the VSOs had told me over the years for me to just drop the cardiac claims issue and file solely on hypertension which is a 10% compensable issue, if you take daily pills to control it. Then once that was granted to then apply for CAD as the nexus from hypertension to my severe cardiac problems, doing it their way would have lost me compensation from when I first filed the cardiac claim in Dec 2002. I did not listen to the SOs who are the ones who are supposed to know how to file comp claims they all told me I would never get it approved and they would not waste their time doing it. So I did it myself, in April 2009 the BVA Judge assigned to my case, read all of the evidence and granted my CA|D and hypertension as a secondary service connected issue to my already SC PTSD.
I had done what the experts had spent 7 years telling me that I could not and could not win. The people that gave me the inspiration to keep fighting for myself and to help other veterans fight the system were men like Larry Scott and Jim Strickland. Another website that was a source of inspiration was a place called Had It the name came from a lady named T Bird who founded the site when she finally had her fill of depending on VSO's messing up her claim and in frustration she started this site to find other veterans with knowledge on how to deal with the VA Regional Offices to aid her in her many issues with the VA claims system and how to make it work for her.
Many veterans post there and share the facts of how to handle your claim, either working with a VSO or how to do it yourself, and if needed where and how to find a lawyer that deals with veterans issues as a main case load. veterans law is far more intricate than even filing a SSD claim as the VA is constantly changing the rules, and you have to know what rule was in effect when you filed your claim and what the new rules state.
Many veterans want to file CUE claims which stands for Clear Unmistakable Error in order to get one of these claims approved you need many things copies of the veterans records from decades ago, what the CFR 28 stated then and what does it state now. Did the VA make the mistake or did the veteran just give up in frustration? It makes a large difference if the veteran gave up in disgust then no the government does not owe them years and possibly decades of back pay but occasionally there is the error where the paperwork was not done properly by the VA.
Back in 2005 I was part of a series of articles by McClatchy News where one of the claims was from a WW2 era pilot who had been fighting the VA for compensation as he had lost his left eye while as a pilot, as he had memorized the eye chart before he went blind in his left eye he just covered up his right eye during exams and repeated the memorized eye chart and he kept flying until 1945. He then filed a claim in 1946 for the lost eye, the VA denied his claim based on his last flight physical in 1945 showing he had perfect vision in his left eye. Forget the fact that his eye was a fake eye and the Army docs willingly ignored this, the VA would not let facts get in the way of compensating him.
He kept fighting finally in 2005 the Veterans Administration admitted he had been blind since he left the Army Air Corp in 1945 and paid him 20% service connected back to June 1945 when he left the Army. It only took him 60 years of appeals, contacting his Congressman and Senators before the VA finally did the right thing.
There are not enough Larry Scotts or Jim Stricklands in the world today, they are both trusted source's for veterans rights, news, and to confirm facts rather than allow rumors to run rampant they would just flat shut them down outlandish lies like all veterans with PTSD would lose their right to own guns even if they were only rated at 10% just having the diagnosis alone would let the government take your weapons away, they stopped that quick. They showed the regulation that only allows the government to take away weapons from patients adjudicated to be incompetent and totally disabled by "mental disease" not just PTSD.
It is hard enough to get people to seek help for PTSD to scare them by telling them by seeking help for it, that would just allow President Obama to take their guns which is and was BS.
Many of us have been fighting for years to get the diagnosis of PTSD destigmatized we want people to seek help, not force them into staying in the woods drinking and using illegal drugs, we want them in treatment and getting the help and compensation they deserve, the VA has created the Vet Centers which are not on VA Medical Centers as many veterans do not trust the government so they keep them separate from the VA campuses. The object is to get veterans in to treatment, any way possible, we owe it to them to make it less stressful to obtain counseling they are also now doing a lot of work with family members of the fallen from OIF/OEF, many cities have Vet centers that do not have VA Medical centers. There is also the possibility of getting help thru the fee basis program if your town has no Vet center nor VA Medical center available but before the VA will pay the bills for treatment it has to be pre-authorized before going to a mental health professional.
Larry Scott will be missed, I hope he finds some days of enjoyment in his retirement. I know the web is full of web sites but this was one of the best.