Q&A - How long does it take to get approved for Federal Disability Retirement?

Hey, everyone. My name is Beau Harris, and I'm president at Harris Federal Employee Law Firm. Thanks for joining me here today on the Federal Benefits Q&A. We recently did a webinar online about the topic of federal disability retirement versus OWCP, federal workers' compensation. Those are two different federal employee benefits. We talked about the differences of those benefits. From that webinar, we had a ton of great questions that came up. In this video today, I'm going to break down some of the best questions we got and try to give you the best answers that we can come up with. Let's hop in. The first question we're going to cover is, can you receive multiple schedule awards if you have multiple accepted OWCP claims? Actually you can receive multiple schedule awards under OWCP claims. A lot of times people assume you can't, but the truth is you can. A couple of different ways is one is if it's a different body part. That's one way. The other way is if it's a condition where your impairment has increased over time. You can then come back and request an amended schedule award or an additional schedule award. Okay, so the next question is, does the time on OWCP federal workers' compensation count towards my credible years of service at retirement? Okay, that was a great question and it's a little complex, but here's the basics. Six months out of every year that you're on federal workers' compensation wage loss benefits does count towards credible years of service, but one other thing to remember is that if you are approved for federal disability retirement, then the entire year actually counts towards credible years of service. The next question is, can I apply for federal disability retirement while receiving OWCP wage loss payments? Okay, this is a question that our office gets a lot and here's what we think that you should know about it. Yes, you can apply for federal disability retirement benefits while you're on OWCP wage loss benefits. A lot of people don't think you can, but you actually can. The thing that you can't do is receive both of those benefits at the same time. You can elect to choose federal disability retirement in lieu of workers' compensation once you get approved, but you can also suspend the federal disability retirement to not start until and after you're off of OWCP benefits. So the last question that we're going to cover is how long does it take to get approved for federal disability retirement? This is another great question that's really important to our clients because honestly everybody wants to know, when will I be approved? Historically, we've seen anywhere between six to 12 months until we get a decision from the Office of Personal Management. But recently actually, we've been encouraged because we've seen decisions in as little as two to four months, which is great. It's also a great time to apply. I really hope this video helped shed some light and some information about some questions that you or maybe one of your coworkers might have about federal employee benefits. Please subscribe to our channel. We're going to be bringing many more videos about federal employee benefits that we think can hopefully help a lot of you out there. Please also click the link below. We're going to have a blog post that's going to recap a lot of this information for you. We hope to see you here next time.