In a report entitled ‘Eliminate Concurrent Receipt of Retirement Pay and Disability Compensation for Disabled Veterans’, the Congressional Budget Office offers up Concurrent Receipt as an option to reduce the federal budget out to 2026. Granted, they are just doing their jobs, but when things like this make it on to lists, they start to take on a life of their own. Since the CBO estimates the Federal Budget could save $139 Billion over the next 10 years, someone is going to take a serious look at this.
For those of you unfamiliar with Concurrent Receipt, it is a payment system which compensates military retirees for their service connected disabilities. Until 2003, military retirees were not provided the same level of compensation as nonretired disabled Veterans were receiving. Rather than getting their full retirement annuity and their disability compensation, they had to choose between receiving their full retirement annuity from DoD or receiving their disability benefit from VA and forgoing an equal amount of their DoD retirement annuity; that reduction in the retirement annuity is typically referred to as the VA Offset. Because the retirement annuity is generally taxable and disability compensation is not, most retirees chose the second alternative.
The problem is that the two pays are for different purposes. Military retirement is just that; to pay for loyal service lasting 20 or more years, while disability compensation is meant to renumerate for pain, suffering and loss of physical function during military service. To combine the two, takes the physical well being of career service members for granted, by not fully compensating them for their service connected disabilities.
Fortunately, the 2003 NDAA set a timetable for correcting the VA Offset and now retirees recieve full VA disability benefits in addition to their retirement pay. This CBO proposal shows that a bean counter wants to once again strip retirees of their fair VA disability compensation. Read the full proposal at www.cbo.gov/budget-options/2016/52177 and keep an eye and ear out for any attempts to adopt this strategy as law.
