Background

This transmittal amends the Hearings, Appeals and Litigation Law (HALLEX) manual Chapter I-3-4 to provide the Appeals Council (AC) with instructions for handling a claimant's request for dismissal of his or her request for review of an administrative law judge's action. These changes were necessary to ensure the AC is consistent in developing withdrawal requests when it is not clear that an unrepresented claimant understands the effects of withdrawing a request for review.

Explanation of Content and Changes

This transmittal revises I-3-4-3 to clarify when and how AC staff develops a withdrawal request when it is not clear that an unrepresented claimant understands the effects of withdrawing a request for review. Additionally, we added several notes to clarify common issues relating to withdrawal requests and to make our provisions more consistent with information in the Program Operations Manual System (POMS). We also made several editorial and organizational revisions.

I-3-4-3 A. – We added general information previously included in other sections of the provision. We added two notes to clarify issues commonly encountered at the AC level.

I-3-4-3 B. – We modified the title of the section to “Determining Whether Claimant Understands the Effects of Dismissal” to better reflect the new purpose of the section, and moved the information currently in subsection B to subsections A and C. We clarified that the AC will generally not need to develop a request when a representative submitted the withdrawal request on behalf of the claimant. We also added specific instructions on how to develop a withdrawal request and the information the AC must provide to the claimant.

I-3-4-3 C. – We inserted the information previously included in subsection B and clarified the instruction. We made other formatting and editorial changes.

I-3-4-3 D. – We created a new subsection D to provide an illustrative example of the type of letter that the Appeals Council will send to a claimant to develop a withdrawal request.

Date: April 24, 2013