Last Updated on October 1, 2009
In Federal Disability Retirements, the general rule is as follows: waiting for your agency to act in some way that may prove to be beneficial to your case, is an act of futility. Whether it is to wait for a performance appraisal; whether to see if the Agency will accommodate you, or not; whether you are waiting for a response from your Supervisor to see if he or she will support your Federal Disability Retirement application, etc. — in the end, a disability retirement application under FERS or CSRS is a medical issue. It is not an “Agency Application for Disability Retirement”; it is not a “Supervisor’s Application for Disability Retirement”. It is a medical disability retirement, inseparable from the Federal or Postal employee who is filing for the benefit. As such, the proper focus should be placed upon the sufficient and substantiating medical documentation. If the medical documentation, combined with the applicant’s statement of disability, are persuasive with respect to the correlative force of being unable to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, then such a combined force makes all other issues essentially moot and irrelevant. Don’t wait upon an agency to act; to act affirmatively without depending upon the agency is always the best route to follow.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire