Robert R. McGill Administrative Law Blog on Lawyers.com

     Never be deceptive in your filing.  Always be truthful.  To be deceptive or untruthful will harm your credibility, your case, and ultimately, may defeat your ability to obtain disability retirement benefits.  Now, there is a conceptual distinction between being "truthful" and emphasizing certain issues of your case, while leaving certain other issues as secondary and less prominent in the documents & supportive papers filed.  Thus, to take a rather crude example, while everyone in the world spends a great deal of his or her life in the restroom, we rarely -- if ever -- talk about such events.  Is it because we are not being "truthful"?  No -- instead, while it is an issue which is not emphasized, it is not something which we are also being deceptive about.  Thus, with respect to disability retirement issues, one should never deliberately attempt to mislead, hide, or otherwise "expunge" certain aspects of the disability retirement application.  At the same time, however, those aspects which are not very helpful, or which may harm your case, should not be placed in bold-type or underlined in red.  Wherever possible, those aspects which will weaken your case, should simply be de-emphasized -- but never deliberately hidden.

Sincerely, Robert R. McGill, Esquire