What are the Executive Factual Reports and Why Do They Cause So Many Sports Injury Claims to Fail?
Essential sports injury evidence
The story is a familiar one: A serviceman or woman suffers an injury playing sports and decides to submit a claim through the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme [AFCS].
What they don’t realise, because Veterans UK don’t make a big thing of it, is that unless you submit the key evidence to support your claim then it’s undoubtedly going to fail. You will have wasted 5 months of your time waiting to receive the bad news that you’re not going to receive any compensation.
Mistake No 1
Mistake No 1 comes right at the beginning when claimants who ‘go it alone’ in submitting these applications fail to understand that there is a difference between playing sports where you are representing your Unit/Battalion and taking part in a routine sports afternoon kick around.
One of the fundamental pieces of evidence needed to support a sports injury claim is proof that you were authorised to take part in the event that led to your injury. That’s fairly straightforward if you’re playing rugby for the British Army and an Admin Order has been raised by someone up the chain of command. It gives clear direction that you were ‘authorised’ to take part in that match and therefore if you’re injured you have the evidence you need to support your Armed Forces Compensation Scheme claim.
If you’re taking part in a routine sports afternoon and playing football with your mates then the chances are that no Admin Order will have been drafted for that event. In reality you are still ‘authorised’ to have taken part because in the military the routine sports afternoon activities are compulsory – you have no choice.
However the difference this makes is significant: two people playing football on adjacent pitches, where one has the Admin Order authorising them to take part and the other is playing in a friendly where there is no Admin Order, have wildly contrasting chances of making a successful Armed Forces Compensation Scheme claim.
Mistake No 2
Mistake No 2 happens because claimants fail to take on board that that the onus of proving their case rests with them. Veterans UK are not there to run around trying to find the right evidence from the right source just so that they can pay a claimant £10,000 for their injury.
What they will do, if no Admin Order or Calling Order exists for the event in which a claimant is injured, is write to the Commanding Officer to ask for what is known as an Executive Factual Report [EFR]. This is effectively a letter where an officer confirms that an individual was taking part in Battalion PT or some other sports event and sustained an injury.
The problem with Executive Factual Reports is that they rely on the goodwill of the person that actually receives the request to do something about it. It’s yet more paperwork that does not have a high priority and there are other factors that make the request for one a nuisance. Commanding Officers rarely have any idea of who the claimant is [personally] and that means the request is passed down the chain of command until it reaches someone who might remember the claimant playing football 18 months earlier, for example, and suffered an injury.
Then comes the age-old problem of who has the time, or interest, to investigate an incident that might have taken place months or years earlier and then sit down and draft a letter back to Veterans UK just so that someone they don’t remember can be awarded some compensation. The stark reality is that these requests for Executive Factual Reports often end up collecting dust in someone’s Pending Tray. People in the military move around with alarming regularity and the inconvenience of processing that request from Veterans UK in relation to an application for compensation means it ends up at the bottom of the pile.
The good news
The good news is that our many years of experience has taught us there are other ways to approach the problem, and our advice to all servicemen and women who come unstuck because of Admin Orders, Calling Orders or the elusive Executive Factual Report is to come and seek advice.
With an Executive Factual Report you are up against red tape, a lack of continuity, an apathetic approach to the request, and on top of all that it is deemed a low priority. Cutting through the red tape to get the job done and secure the evidence is not for the faint hearted.