AskNOD

Veteran advocate’s blog · “Nod,” veteran advocate and author

Two decades of hard-won doctrine on the claims system’s sharpest edges — Special Monthly Compensation, aid and attendance, and the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims — written by an advocate who has fought the VA to the Federal Circuit and won.

Why we carry them. When a question turns on SMC or aid-and-attendance doctrine, this is the deepest well we know. We mine the doctrine, in his citations — the law, checked at the source.

Start here — their essential work

• THE SECRETARY COLLINS REPORT CARD–TRICKED OR TREATED? — Grades the Secretary through a live Veterans Court case (26-7077) over two aid-and-attendance ratings and the regulatory path — §§3.350(h) and 3.352(b) — to the higher SMC levels.
• DEPT. OF VET AFFAIRS–WORKING 9 TO 5 ON DENIALS — On SMC mission creep since January 2025: the quiet ways the goalposts move on the highest levels of compensation.
• BVA– R2 FOR ALL THE MARBLES AND AN ODE TO COMBAT LOUIE — A bedridden double-amputee veteran was held at two SMC-K awards for years; the Board granted R2 — and VA’s SMC calculator, broken since 2019, refused to implement it.
• BVA–R1 WITH ONLY ONE L — Using Barry v. McDonough’s half-step bumps — the backdoor SMC P route — to reach R1 starting from a single SMC L.
• HOW MANY TIMES MUST A CANNONBALL FLY? (2025-09-14) — The Board is not deciding hearing dockets in order: a Tennessee widow has waited since her April 2024 hearing for a DIC decision on a claim begun in 2015.
• HEPATIC ENCEPHALOPATHY–WORD SALAD FOR BRAIN FOG — VA raters read the hepatitis C and cirrhosis codes to require every symptom at once; the win came through hepatic encephalopathy and extraschedular TDIU under §3.321.
• VBA348-CATFISHING ON THE WILLAMETTE RIVER — A VA rater phoned a veteran directly to talk him out of his own evidence; the case lays out the TBI-then-PTSD sequence and the IMO strategy that beat the denial.
• SMC T–FINDING SOMEONE TO FIGHT FOR YOU — On SMC T, the top rate for TBI veterans who need aid and attendance — and why these claims are won or lost on who fights them.

Summaries are ours. The work is theirs — we link to it, we don’t lift it. Visit AskNOD →