International Terrorism Victim Expense Reimbursement Program

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE <SUBAGY>Office of Justice Programs</SUBAGY> <CFR>28 CFR Part 94</CFR> <DEPDOC>[Docket No.: OJP (OVC) 1812]</DEPDOC> <RIN>RIN 1121-AA91</RIN> <SUBJECT>International Terrorism Victim Expense Reimbursement Program</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Office for Victims of Crime, Justice. <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Notice of proposed rulemaking. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Office for Victims of Crime (“OVC”) of the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs (“OJP”), proposes this rule to amend the program regulations for the International Terrorism Victim Expense Reimbursement Program (“ITVERP”), to streamline program operation, more expressly reflect certain policy and procedures adopted by OVC since it began administering the program in 2006, and to adjust cost category caps. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> Comments must be received by no later than 11:59 p.m., E.T., on March 24, 2025. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> <E T="03">Electronic comments:</E> OVC encourages commenters to submit all comments electronically through the Federal eRulemaking Portal, which provides the ability to type comments directly into the comment field on the web page or attach a file. Please go to <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov</E> and follow the on-line instructions at that site for submitting comments. Upon completion of your submission, you will receive a Comment Tracking Number. Submitted comments are not instantaneously available for public view on <E T="03">regulations.gov</E> . If you have received a Comment Tracking Number, you have submitted your comment successfully and there is no need to resubmit the same comment. Commenters should be aware that the system will not accept comments after 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on the last day of the comment period. <E T="03">Paper comments:</E> OVC prefers to receive comments via <E T="03">www.regulations.gov</E> where possible. Paper comments that duplicate electronic submissions are not necessary and are discouraged. Should you wish to mail a paper comment in lieu of an electronic comment, it should be sent via regular or express mail to: ITVERP, Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, 810 7th Street NW, Washington, DC 20531. To ensure proper handling of comments, please reference “OJP Docket No. 1812” on all electronic and written correspondence, including any attachments. <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Victoria Jolicoeur, International Terrorism Victim Expense Reimbursement Program, Office for Victims of Crime, at 202-307-5134. </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> <HD SOURCE="HD1">I. Posting of Public Comments</HD> Please note that all comments received are considered part of the public record and made available for public inspection online at <E T="03">www.regulations.gov</E> . Such information includes personal identifying information (such as your name, address, etc.) voluntarily submitted by the commenter. The Freedom of Information Act applies to all comments received. If you wish to submit personal identifying information (such as your name, address, etc.) as part of your comment, but do not wish for it to be posted online, you must include the phrase “PERSONAL IDENTIFYING INFORMATION” in the first paragraph of your comment. You must also place all of the personal identifying information that you do not want posted online in the first paragraph of your comment, and identify with specificity what information you want the agency to redact. If you wish to submit confidential business information as part of your comment, but do not wish it to be posted online, you must include the phrase “CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION” in the first paragraph of your comment. You must also prominently identify all confidential business information to be redacted within the comment. If a comment has so much confidential business information that it cannot be effectively redacted, the agency may choose not to post all or part of that comment. Personal identifying information identified and located as set forth above will be placed in the agency's public docket file, but not posted online. Confidential business information identified and located as set forth above will not be placed in the public docket file. If you wish to inspect the agency's public docket file in person by appointment, please see the “For Further Information Contact” paragraph. <HD SOURCE="HD1">II. Background</HD> The Victims of Crime Act of 1984 (VOCA), sec. 1404C (34 U.S.C. 20106), added in an amendment to VOCA by the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) of 2000, sec. 2003(c), authorizes OVC to reimburse certain expenses to eligible victims of acts of international terrorism. Eligible victims include U.S. nationals, as well as foreign nationals working for the U.S. government at the time of the terrorist act. OVC published a notice of proposed rulemaking at 70 FR 49518-49525, on August 24, 2005, and published the current rule at 71 FR 52446, on September 6, 2006, and it went into effect on October 6, 2006. On April 11, 2011, at 76 FR 19909, OVC published an interim-final rule allowing the Director additional discretion to accept late-filed claims upon a showing of good cause. This was finalized at 88 FR 3656 on January 20, 2023. Aside from the 2011 amendment to the deadline provision, the overall rule, including category caps, has not been updated since the program's inception. OVC proposes this rule, pursuant to its rulemaking authority at 34 U.S.C. 20110(a), to make minor updates to the regulations to reflect contemporary program policies and procedures adopted by OVC since it began administering the program in 2006, and to adjust cost category caps. <HD SOURCE="HD1">III. Section-by-Section Discussion of Proposed Changes</HD> The following is a summary of the changes that OVC proposes: <GPOTABLE COLS="2" OPTS="L2,nj,tp0,i1" CDEF="s50,r150"> <CHED H="1">Current provision</CHED> <CHED H="1">Proposed change</CHED> <ROW> <ENT I="01"> 94.12(c) Definition of <E T="03">Collateral sources</E> </ENT> <ENT>Makes patent longstanding OVC policy of presuming (unless the claimant demonstrates otherwise) that hostile fire or imminent danger pay for U.S. military personnel who claim expenses for incidents occurring in an officially designated combat zone or a qualified hazardous duty area, is a collateral source. Non-substantive changes to improve readability.</ENT> </ROW> <ROW> <ENT I="01"> 94.12(g) Definition of <E T="03">Funeral and burial</E> </ENT> <ENT>Allows reimbursement of travel costs for up to five family members, instead of two. This reflects OVC's observation that it is common for more than two family members to travel to attend victim funerals. Increasing the cap to five would allow OVC to better assist victims with legitimate expenses while maintaining a cap on program expenses for funeral travel.</ENT> </ROW> <ROW> <ENT I="01"> 94.12(i) Definition of <E T="03">Incompetent</E> </ENT> <ENT>Minor change to replace the outdated and offensive term “mental retardation” with “cognitive disability.”</ENT> </ROW> <ROW> <ENT I="01"> 94.12(r) Definition of <E T="03">Property loss</E> </ENT> <ENT>Adds the word “typically” when providing that medical devices are to be included under the medical expense category and not the property loss category. This would replace the current limit with a presumption to allow OVC to characterize medical device loss in the category that maximizes victim reimbursement.</ENT> </ROW> <ROW> <ENT I="01"> 94.12(u) Definition of <E T="03">Victim</E> </ENT> <ENT>Adds the words “Is otherwise unable to submit a claim as a result of the act of terrorism” (in a new subparagraph (iv) under (u)(2)) to allow for the surviving spouse, children, parents, and siblings to be considered victims for purposes of this program when an individual is rendered missing as a result of an act of international terrorism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has indicated to OVC that it has encountered victims who would have found such support from ITVERP to be beneficial.</ENT> </ROW> <ROW> <ENT I="01">94.21 Eligibility</ENT> <ENT>Clarifies OVC's longstanding practice of allowing applicants to submit an initial application, followed by supplemental applications for expenses incurred after the initial application (e.g., ongoing medical care).</ENT> </ROW> <ROW> <ENT I="01">94.23 Amount of reimbursement</ENT> <ENT>Clarifies that the reimbursement cap in effect at the time that the application (whether initial or supplemental) is received is the cap that applies to all awards under that application. Thus, an applicant may file a supplemental claim to take advantage of a higher cap limit in categories where that applicant previously hit the cap. This rule increases the administrative burden on OVC to determine additional supplemental claims, but OVC anticipates being able to manage this burden within current program resources due to the ITVERP's relatively small size. The change has the benefit of providing better coverage of actual victim expenses and avoiding discrepancies between caps applied to claimants under the same incident who filed at different times. The proposed provision also adds language to automatically adjust the caps for inflation every five years.</ENT> </ROW> <ROW> <ENT I="01">94.24 Determination of the award</ENT> <ENT>Makes patent OVC's preferred practice of providing claimant notification via electronic means (e.g., email or its claims management system) by default.</ENT> </ROW> <ROW> <ENT I="01">94.25 Collateral sources</ENT> <ENT>Makes non-substantive edits to paragraph (a) to clarify the provision, which addresses when offset of ITVERP r ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 34k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━