MST and PACT Identification in Caseflow
The release of MST/PACT was in support of the H.R.6961 - Dignity for MST Survivors Act and PACT Act. The purpose of the initiative was to give admin Intake users, judges, and attorneys the ability to label issues and decisions in Caseflow with a special issue designation of MST and/or PACT. Appeals that contain MST and/or PACT display a badge throughout Caseflow so that users who interact with Caseflow understand that the case contains MST and/or PACT cases. Due to similar workflows, the two initiatives were developed together.
For AMA appeals, special issue statuses are added directly to Request Issues and Decision Issues. For MST and PACT badge identification, Decision Issues will override their corresponding Request Issue if the special issue statues are different (i.e. If a Request issue is labeled as MST, and a decision was made changing the status to None, no MST badge would display for that appeal within Caseflow).
For legacy appeals, issue level MST and PACT statues are tracked directly on the ISSUES table in VACOLS. The statues come from the ISSMST and ISSPACT columns of the ISSUES table, and the syntax is 'Y' and 'N' for yes/no (true/false).
Due to special issues previously being tracked on the Appeal level in the SpecialIssueList, MST badge tracking takes into account that if an appeal has a special issue list associated with it with MST, the MST badge will display even if no issues have MST labeled.
Whenever a special issue designation is added or removed, a corresponding task is created and logged on the Case Timeline to show the change. The tasks created for tracking are:
- Establishment Task: The establishment task is created whenever a new appeal is established in Intake that has issues new issues that contain MST and/or PACT statuses. If an issue was a Contestable Issue (Rating or Contention) that had a pre-existing MST/PACT status, the task labels the original status that came from the Contestable Issue. A log is made for each issue on the appeal.
- IssueUpdate Task: An Issue Update task is created when
- An issue is added to an Appeal with MST/PACT
- An issue with MST/PACT is removed from an appeal
- An issue special issue status is added/edited/removed from an issue.
- A judge or attorney creates a decision issue that conflicts with the issue special issue status
A task is created for each issue to log the changes that occurred.
Behind the scenes of each task created on the timeline, a SpecialIssuesChanges record is created in the database to log the key information of the change. This audit table serves to give a full timeline from a reporting standpoint and should be used for auditing the history of an appeal's special issue record if needed.
MST/PACT statuses can be added to new issues in Intake by BVA Intake Admins and Clerk of the Board (COB) members. As of the initial release of MST/PACT, special issue statuses can only be added to 10182 Appeals. Once a 10182 appeal is created, the Intake user can access the workflow on the Add Issues Page.
Click the add issue button to add a new issue to the appeal. If the veteran has previous issues (known as Contestable Issues), the user has the ability to add MST/PACT to the issue before adding it to the Intake. The MST/PACT workflow will reach out to BGS and checks if the Contestable Issue has a corresponding Contention and/or Rating with a special issue status of MST and/or PACT. If the Contestable Issue has MST and/or PACT, the corresponding checkboxes will be pre-filled in and cannot be removed until the Intake is completed. This was done so that special issues originating from VBMS would be maintained until they entered Caseflow since VBMS is considered the "source of truth" for special issue statuses.
Creating an issue that isn't related to an existing Rating, the Intake user has the capability to add MST/PACT statuses to the issue via checkboxes on the bottom of the modal.
When completed, MST/PACT special issues statuses will display in text under each issue that has MST and/or PACT.
Once establishing the appeal and navigating to the appeal's Case Details page, you will notice:
- MST/PACT badges display on the case
- Issues are labeled with Special Issues: statuses.
- an Establishment task is created on the Case Timeline to log the introduction of issue(s) to Caseflow with special issue statuses. If a special issue status came from VBMS via the BGS Service, the task will show the original status that came from the rating and/or contention.
Similar to the Intake Add Issues page, Intake and COB users can add/edit special issue statuses on issues for both AMA and Legacy appeals. To edit an issue, click on the Correct issues link on the Case Details page for an appeal. On the Edit Issues page, click the Select action dropdown next to the issue, and select Edit issue to add/remove special issue statuses. When edits are completed and the appeal is saved, a Success Banner will show how many special issue statuses were added and/or removed. On the Case Timeline, an IssueUpdateTask is created to show the before/after changes for each issue edited or created.
With the introduction of MST/PACT, judges and attorneys can now add special issue designations to Legacy and AMA appeal issues via the draft decisions and decisions workflow. With the MST feature toggle enabled, the MST status on the Special Issues Page in the Judge/Attorney workflow is now hidden and moved to the issue level on the Review Disposition Page.
For AMA decisions, special issue statuses can be added to decisions via the Edit link in the draft decisions/decisions workflow.
For legacy issues, the workflow can be accessed by clicking the Edit Issue link.
- Queue Case Details Page
- Queue Veterans Search Page
- AMA Attorney Draft Decisions page
- AMA Judge Decisions page
- Legacy Attorney Draft Decisions page
- Legacy Judge Decisions page
- Hearings Schedule
- Queue pages (follows other badge behavior)
- Intake Add Issues Pages
- Queue Edit Issues Page
- Queue Case Details Page
- AMA Attorney Draft Decisions page
- AMA Judge Decisions page
- Legacy Attorney Draft Decisions page
- Legacy Judge Decisions page
- IDT File (in appeal_details_serializer.rb file)
- Download Hearing Schedule file
- Select/Review Remand Reasons
Work for MST is enabled with the Feature Toggle mst_identification and work for PACT is enabled with pact_identification. A 3rd feature toggle was created for legacy issues called legacy_mst_pact_identification. A 4th toggle was created called justification_reason but never released. This feature toggle was for adding justification reasons for adding/removing MST/PACT to an issue. The justification reasons were never released so the development work was hidden behind the toggle in case future use was needed.
To be able to toggle MST/PACT on/off, MST/PACT statuses are dependent on feature toggles in app/models/serializers/work_queue/appeal_serializer.rbfor request issues and decision issues, and app/models/serializers/work_queue/legacy_issue_serializer.rb for Legacy issues. The serializers are set up to always return false if the feature toggle is disabled, even if the database has special issue data for the corresponding issue.
To get special issues from Ratings and Contentions from the BGS Service, the intake workflow uses a class called SpecialIssueComparator. The class is called when contestable issues are generated in the contestable_issue.rb model. The class runs these checks to limit the number of calls to the BGS service:
- checks for feature toggles (returns
falseif the toggle is disabled) - check if the existing issue (rating) has the MST or PACT special issue status.
- If no special issue designations exists on the rating, a new call to the BGS service happens in
find_contentions_by_participant_idwhich grabs all contentions by the participant ID of the claimant. The contentions are then cached, cycled, and matched with their corresponding Rating. Once matched, the contention is checked for special issue designations.