Rating Authorities
Topics:
The VA’s Rating Authorities
The DoD’s Rating Authorities
On this site, we use the term “Rating Authorities” to refer to the people who make the rating decisions for Military Disability.
Throughout your military disability journey, you’ll hear other terms like “claim processors,” “adjudicators,” “raters,” etc., but since we cover both of the DoD and VA systems and numerous special boards, like the PDBR, we needed a general term to describe anyone assigning the actual disability ratings, regardless of their affiliation.
Rating Authorities are individual caseworkers who are assigned to review each claim or appeal.
All Rating Authorities are required to use the laws of the VASRD to assign Military Disability Ratings to conditions.
If a veteran disagrees with their decision, they can submit appeals to higher authorities. See our DoD Appeals and VA Appeals pages for complete descriptions of the appeals processes.
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The VA’s Rating Authorities
For the VA, each VA Disability Claim is reviewed by a claims processor. As the VA’s front-line Rating Authorities, the claims processors use the VASRD and case precedent to assign ratings to each condition claimed. If a veteran does not agree with these ratings, they can submit an appeal, and higher level authorities, like the BVA, will then review their case.
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The DoD’s Rating Authorities
Before 2009, the Physical Evaluation Board (PEB) acted as the DoD’s Rating Authorities. They assigned ratings to conditions based on each branch’s own rating system (not the VASRD), but this caused inconsistencies within the military disability system with people in different branches with the same condition receiving different ratings.
To fix this problem, the Integrated Disability Evaluation System was set up in 2009 to streamline the disability rating process by merging the DoD Disability Process with the VA Disability Process.
The Integrated Disability Evaluation System essentially got rid of the DoD’s Rating Authorities. Now, the VA’s authorities make the rating decisions, and the DoD “borrows” and uses those ratings as their own.
The only times the DoD makes any rating decisions separate from the VA is when a service member is placed on TDRL or when a case is being reviewed by the PDBR.
