This week the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (DDC) entered judgment in favor of an Army Reserve officer-client who challenged the Army’s denial of his attempts to transfer a portion of his GI Bill benefits to his children. The GI Bill provides valuable benefits to qualifying servicemembers and, in 2008, Congress passed a law permitting members to transfer these benefits to their dependents provided that the members effectuate the transfer before they leave active duty. As part of the Transfer of Education Benefits (TEB) program roll-out, the Department of Defense mandated that the services provide individual pre-separation counseling on the pre-separation transfer requirement. The Army utterly failed to counsel members. Thus, like LTC Marta, many members were unaware of the pre-separation transfer requirement and when they attempted to transfer their benefits to their children after they had left active duty, they were denied.
Many of these members attempted to seek relief from the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records (ABCMR) only to be told that despite the fact they were not given mandatory counseling, the Board would not correct their records to reflect timely election (a power well within the Board’s authority). The Board applied what was essentially standardized rationale to cases similar to LTC Marta’s, denying them essentially as a matter of board policy.
After LTC Marta was twice denied by the ABCMR, we sought judicial review in the in the DDC asking the court to find unlawful and set aside the ABCMR’s decision. We prevailed. In so doing, the judge held that the ABCMR’s denial rational was “utterly illogical” and otherwise failed to address important authority from another federal court in a similar case that set aside a similar case. Although the judge remanded the matter back to the ABCMR for further consideration, the Board likely will have little choice but to grant relief, as all of its previous arguments were dismantled by the court.
LTC Marta is likely one of many applicants whose ABCMR applications were denied with almost identical rationale the Court has now held to be unlawful. It is our hope this case opens the door to possible relief for these servicemembers who earned right to transfer education benefits to their dependents.