Legal Services, General Counsel, and Miscellaneous Claims

DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS <CFR>38 CFR Parts 14 and 36</CFR> <RIN>RIN 2900-AS05</RIN> <SUBJECT>Legal Services, General Counsel, and Miscellaneous Claims</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Department of Veterans Affairs. <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Proposed rule. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) proposes to amend its regulations governing Legal Services, the Office of General Counsel, and Miscellaneous Claims to reflect nomenclature changes regarding employees and groups within the Office of General Counsel as well as to make other changes intended to further clarify and explain various functions and procedures within the Office of General Counsel. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> Comments must be received on or before January 6, 2025. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> Comments must be submitted through <E T="03">www.regulations.gov.</E> Except as provided below, comments received before the close of the comment period will be available at <E T="03">www.regulations.gov</E> for public viewing, inspection, or copying, including any personally identifiable or confidential business information that is included in a comment. We post the comments received before the close of the comment period on <E T="03">www.regulations.gov</E> as soon as possible after they have been received. VA will not post on <E T="03">www.regulations.gov</E> public comments that make threats to individuals or institutions or suggest that the commenter will take actions to harm an individual. VA encourages individuals not to submit duplicative comments; however, we will post comments from multiple unique commenters even if the content is identical or nearly identical to other comments. Any public comment received after the comment period's closing date is considered late and will not be considered in the final rulemaking. In accordance with the Providing Accountability Through Transparency Act of 2023, a 100 word Plain-Language Summary of this proposed rule is available at <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> , under RIN 2900-AS05. <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Michael Gibbs, Executive Director, Management, Planning and Analysis, Office of General Counsel (026), Department of Veterans Affairs, 810 Vermont Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20420, (202) 461-4995. (This is not a toll-free telephone number.) </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> Title 38 of the Code of Federal Regulations, chapter I, part 14, governs Legal Services, General Counsel, and Miscellaneous Claims. Executive Order 13563 requires agencies to carry out retrospective analyses of rules that “may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned.” Exec. Order No. 13563, section 6, 76 FR 3821, 3822 (Jan. 21, 2011). After a review of 38 CFR part 14, VA's Office of General Counsel (OGC) is proposing revisions to reflect nomenclature changes to the names of certain Office of General Counsel offices and the employees in those offices. The proposed revisions would also make changes in certain policies, procedures, and authorities. In the amendatory text of this proposed rule, OGC is removing 38 CFR 14.503 through 14.504 and revising 38 CFR 14.500 through 14.502, 14.505 through 507, 14.514 through 14.518, 14.560 through 14.561, 14.600 through 14.605, 14.615 through 14.619, 14.664 through 14.669, and 14.800 through 14.810, when necessary to (1) decrease the likelihood of introducing errors, (2) improve efficiency during the publication process, and (3) meet Office of the Federal Register drafting and formatting requirements for publication. The substantive individual changes to the affected CFR units are detailed elsewhere in this preamble. As a result of a reorganization, the Office of General Counsel changed its organizational structure from regions to districts, and further changed the names of the leadership in those districts from Regional Counsel to Chief Counsel or District Chief Counsel. To reflect those changes, the following sections are proposed to be amended to reflect the change in position titles from “Regional Counsel” to “Chief Counsel:” §§ 14.500(e), 14.501's title and paragraphs (a) and (c) through (e), 14.514(a), (b), and (e), and 14.516. The Regulation's Table of Contents is also proposed to be amended to reflect the new “Chief Counsel” language in § 14.501. Multiple sections are proposed to be amended to reflect a nomenclature change from “Regional Counsel” to “District Chief Counsel.” The sections proposed to be amended to reflect the new language of “District Chief Counsel” are §§ 14.517, 14.518(a) and (b)(1) through (4), 14.560, 14.561, 14.605(b), 14.709(a) through (c), and 14.807(b). Additional sections are proposed to be amended to reflect a nomenclature change from “his or her” to “their” in §§ 14.500(a), 14.514(b) and (c), 14.518(a), 14.600(a), (c) and (d), 14.605(b) through (e), 14.615(b) and (c), 14.618(a), 14.619(a), 14.560, 14.665(a), 14.667(a), 14.807(a), and 14.810(f). Proposed amendments are included in §§ 14.605(a), 14.665(a), and 14.807(a) to change “he or she” to “they.” Multiple sections in part 14 are proposed to be amended with various other nomenclature changes as well as changes intended to clarify the meaning of the regulations. The language in § 14.500, “Functions and responsibilities of General Counsel” and specifically paragraph (e) is proposed to be amended to remove “field” from the phrase “system of field offices” and substitute the word “organizations” for the phrase “field installations.” This amendment is proposed as the current language in the regulation is outdated and is no longer used to describe the Agency's various offices, locations, and organizations. In § 14.500(e), the last phrase is proposed to be changed from “the Regional Counsel” to “a Chief Counsel” for consistency in reference to the updated title for these positions and to reflect that these matters may be reported to different Chief Counsels, depending on the type of case. Finally, in paragraph (f), the word “as” is proposed to be inserted in the existing phrase so that it now states: “Other matters as assigned.” Additional amendments are proposed in § 14.501 which is proposed to be renamed to “Functions and Responsibilities of Chief Counsels” to reflect the new position titles of employees formerly referred to as Regional Counsels. Specifically, paragraph (b) is proposed to be amended to include the phrase “Deputy Chief Counsels” before the phrase “and designated staff attorneys” to provide a more comprehensive list of the Office of General Counsel employees who are authorized to perform the tasks listed in this paragraph. Paragraph (c) includes an additional proposed amendment to replace the phrase “installations within the district assigned” with the phrase “organizations within their geographic area of responsibility and/or legal practice area of responsibility.” This amendment is proposed as the term “installations” is outdated and is no longer used to describe the Office of General Counsel's areas of responsibility. Additional changes are proposed in paragraph (b) to correct the spelling of “affidavits” and in paragraph (c) to change the word “authority” to “authorized” for readability. The language in § 14.501(e) is proposed to be amended to remove the sentence “Where it is impractical for the Regional Counsel to perform the legal service because of cost, distance, etc., the customary fee for the service rendered by a local attorney employed by the Regional Counsel will be borne by the administration requesting such action.” This sentence is proposed to be removed as the process described does not have a corresponding statutory authority. Additional amendments are proposed in paragraph (f), including the removal of the phrase “addresses of Regional Counsels are as follows” and the removal of the list of regions within the Office of General Counsel, the Regional Counsel's physical addresses, and the states over which those Regional Counsel offices had jurisdiction. This information is proposed to be replaced with the following statement: “locations and jurisdictions of the District Chief Counsels can be found here: <E T="03">https://www.va.gov/OGC/DistrictOffices.asp.”</E> This web page link and the new language in § 14.501(f) are proposed to reflect the updated office names, jurisdictions, and locations of the District Chief Counsels. The language in § 14.502, “Requests for legal opinions from Central Office” describes the Department officials who may make a request for formal legal advice from the Office of General Counsel. This rulemaking proposes to update this section to reflect grammatical and nomenclature changes. Specifically, the phrase “requests for” is proposed to be replaced with “A request for” at the beginning of the paragraph for readability. To reflect updated titles for individuals who hold various leadership positions in the Department, the following nomenclature changes have been proposed: the phrase “an Under Secretary” will be inserted after “Deputy Secretary” and the phrases “Assistant Secretaries” and “Deputy Assistant Secretaries” will be updated to “an Assistant Secretary” and “a Deputy Assistant Secretary.” The phrase “administration head or top staff office” is proposed to be removed as the individuals described with that language are now referred to more specifically. Finally, the word “and” will be replaced with the word “or” after the phrase “Deputy Assistant Secretary” to indicate that any one of the individuals listed may submit a request for formal legal advice from the Office of General Counsel. The Office of General Counsel proposes to remove certain regulations in their entirety as they contain outda ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 176k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━