ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bradley W. Hennings is a former Veterans Law Judge and is currently a partner at Chisholm Chisholm & Kilpatrick (CCK Law) in Providence, R.I., where his practice is dedicated to representing veterans before the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.

Some Department of Veterans Affairs delays are worse than others. When a veteran’s VA disability rating fails to reflect an actual inability to work, Total Disability based on Individual Unemployability (TDIU) prevents disaster. Think of the former infantryman whose migraines from a blast injury leave him unable to drive or look at a screen for days at a time, yet he only has a 50% disability rating, or the Army veteran whose back pain means he can no longer lift, bend or stand for long enough to keep a job, yet he still cannot prove his condition clearly enough for a 100% schedular rating. Or the Vietnam-era sailor who struggles to articulate how post-traumatic stress disorder interferes with his ability to find employment.

These are the veterans TDIU was designed for: those whose service-connected disabilities have taken away their ability to work in ways that the VA disability rating system does not otherwise consider.

Yet for more than 20 years, veterans in these situations faced a procedural roadblock that had nothing to do with the strength of their evidence. If they didn’t meet the VA’s schedular percentages for TDIU, the Board of Veterans’ Appeals was required to send their case to another VA office for a special review before it could make a decision. That extra step almost never resulted in approval and routinely added months or years of delay. Veterans waited, often in financial crisis, for an answer everyone knew the Board could have made in the first place.

That changed this past October. In Witkowski v. Collins, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims finally ended the requirement that forced these cases into that unnecessary detour. The ruling grew out of a situation many veterans will recognize. James Martin Witkowski, a Navy veteran of the Vietnam era, presented clear evidence that his hearing loss had long made steady employment impossible. Still, the Board believed it couldn’t grant TDIU for the period he sought without first going through the extra referral step. When he asked the Board to decide his case directly, the Board said it could not, setting up the very question the court was ultimately asked to resolve.

April Donahower, an attorney at CCK Law, and her team helped bring that question before the court, giving judges the opportunity to finally examine whether this decades-old process was ever legally required. The court ultimately found that it wasn’t and that veterans should never have been forced to wait because of it.

What this means now is straightforward: veterans seeking extraschedular TDIU can receive a direct decision from the Board based on the evidence in their file. No more being sent back into the system for a step that rarely helped and often harmed. No more losing years to procedural churn.

The decision in Witkowski doesn’t fix every challenge in the disability system, but it removes one of the most persistent sources of delay for those who need TDIU the most. For veterans living with service-connected disabilities that prevent them from working, time and stability matter. This ruling brings the process a step closer to the fairness and efficiency those veterans have long deserved.