 Hello, everyone. I am Shane Learman, DAV Deputy National Legislative Director, and today we will explore one of DAV's 2021 critical policy goals, protecting veterans and the claims and the appeals process. Over the past few years, Congress and VA proposed and enacted many pieces of bipartisan legislation advantageous to veterans and their families, such as the Appeals Modernization Act, the forever GI Bill, the Mission Act, and Benefits for Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans. However, there have been several policy decisions that have negatively impacted veterans in the claims and the appeals processes, which brings us to ensuring correct VA decisions by reestablishing pre-decisional review. For over seven decades, VA maintained a policy which allowed accredited VSOs a pre-decisional review period of 48 hours for decisions on those veterans and claimants the VSO represented. However, on April 24, 2020, VA officially eliminated the pre-decisional review period. DAV is concerned the elimination of this important review period will delay veterans entitlement to earn benefits and add more unnecessary claims and appeals, which could be resolved by pre-decisional review. Therefore, Congress must enact legislation to re-establish the pre-decisional review for all VA accredited representatives to ensure all veterans and claimants receive quality and timely entitlement to benefits. Next is protecting effective dates. Currently, if a veteran submits a claim or appeal on the wrong form, it may take VA months to review and advise the veteran that the claim cannot be accepted and is on the wrong form. VA, however, does not consistently advise the veteran of the correct form nor provide it. Thus, when the veteran does file on the correct form, they can lose months of entitlement. Therefore, Congress must enact legislation to protect veterans' data claim, time periods, and earned benefits by accepting their claims regardless of the form being used. And finally, we must preserve our earned benefits from erosion. There are some disturbing policy proposals which, if enacted, would actually reduce or eliminate existing veterans' benefits. In December 2020, Congressional Budget Office report included a proposal to end VA's individual unemployability or IU payments to disabled veterans at the full retirement age for Social Security. This option to end IU entitlement at the age of 67 is arbitrary. Many veterans in receipt of IU do not have entitlement to Social Security retirement benefits or any employment-based retirement benefits, and depend upon their disability compensation for basic necessities. That is why we need Congress to enact legislation to protect IU from reductions and limitations. CBO's report included other harmful proposals to negatively impact veterans' benefits. The report provides no justification of the options, only that these proposals are solely financial savings placed on the back of veterans. One option is proposing to reduce all veterans' existing VA benefits by 30% on reaching Social Security full retirement age. Another CBO option is to eliminate compensation payments to veterans with combined evaluations of 10 or 20% disabling. CBO also included an option that would remove the tax-free status of VA compensation and include these benefits as taxable income. Therefore, we must protect existing veterans' benefits and make sure we exempt them from pay-go cuts and purely deficit-reducing measures. We ask that you stand with us in protecting veterans in the claims and appeals processes. Thanks for watching, and for more information on this and all of DAV's critical policy goals for 2021, please visit our site DAV.org backslash 2021 mid-winter. Thank you.