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June 17, 2008    DOL Home > ECAB Home   

Employees' Compensation Appeals Board

        The Employees' Compensation Appeals Board (ECAB) was created in 1946 by statute to hear appeals taken from determinations and awards under the Federal Employees' Compensation Act with respect to claims of federal employees injured in the course of their employment. The Board has final authority to determine the liability of the Federal government with respect to the disability or death of employees injured in the scope of their employment. There is no further administrative or judicial appeal of ECAB decisions. The Board, by statute, consists of three Members appointed by the Secretary of Labor, one of whom is designated as Chairman of the Board and administrative manager.

       The Board's mission is to hear and decide cases on appeal from decisions of the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP) in an impartial and expeditious manner. The decisions of the Board are made in accordance with its statutory mandate, based on a thorough review of the case record as compiled by OWCP. Injured federal workers have the opportunity for a full evidentiary hearing with OWCP's Branch of Hearings and Review prior to review of the record by the Board.



ECAB has published a Notice of Proposed Rule Making in the Federal Register, proposing revisions to its Rules of Procedure, 20 C.F.R. Part 501.  ECAB welcomes all comments through August 19, 2008.   Click here for HTML or PDF version.
 








Important Note below about Appellant Name Policy


Note: Effective August 1, 2006, the Employees' Compensation Appeals Board (ECAB) no longer displays the claimant’s full name in its decisions. The 1996 e-FOIA amendments required agencies to publish adjudicatory decisions on the Internet. To limit a claimant's exposure on the Internet, the Department of Labor (DOL) avoids referring directly to the claimant's name in decisions posted on the DOL web site on or after August 1, 2006. The policy applied prospectively only. (DOL’s Office of Administrative Law Judges is adopting a similar policy for Black Lung Act and Longshore Act cases on August 1, 2006.) Decisions already on the DOL web site and published elsewhere are already in the public domain and have not been changed. The caption of a decision and/or order issued on or after August 1, 2006, display only the claimant's initials and those initials should be used in citations to the decision. The initials used in the caption will be the first letter of the first name and the first letter of the last name. Middle initials, middle names and prefixes or suffixes will not be used in the caption. For opinions affected by this policy, two initials rather than the name will be used for citation purposes. (For example: CC, Docket No. 2006-XXX (issued August 2, 2007).)

This policy is intended to protect FECA claimants from unnecessary publicity; it is not based upon a legal requirement. Neither FOIA, nor the Privacy Act, nor any other law compels DOL to take this action. Rather, this policy is based on a desire to address in a responsible way concerns raised by some claimants about the ease of access to their case decisions on the Internet. The policy seeks to comply with legal requirements to make agency decisions available on the Internet, but to do so in a way that limits a claimant's exposure to Internet users.




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