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compensation programs in a one-page unofficial
nutshell:
Compensable Crimes and Victims.
You must offer compensation to victims and survivors of victims of criminal
violence, but no specific compensable crimes are mandated except for drunk
driving and domestic violence (these crimes are singled out for special
attention because there was a time in the 1980s when a number of programs
didn’t cover these offenses). You’re also directed to cover crimes involving
damage to religious property, especially when racially motivated, but your
coverage need only be for costs relating to the physical injury or death that
might be involved, not for the property damage itself. You’re free to cover any other crimes,
including nonviolent economic crimes, if you wish to. In fact, current OVC guidelines encourage you to do so, without
making it mandatory, and you can use federal funds for nonviolent crimes, or include
state payments for those crimes in your payout total for purposes of
calculating your federal grant.
Mandated Expenses. You must pay for medical expenses, mental health counseling, and lost wages if those are attributable to physical injury, and you must cover funeral expenses as well. Beyond these, you can cover anything else you like – except:
Property Damage: VOCA prohibits the use of
federal funds for only one thing: property damage. You can use state funds to
pay for property damage, but you cannot include payments for property damage in
the state-dollar total used to calculate your VOCA grant. There are a few exceptions: property damage
does not include eyeglasses and medical and dental prostheses, and items
necessary for security, such as windows and locks. It’s important to remember that VOCA doesn’t prohibit paying for
items that would be considered property, but rather only for repairing property
damage. You’re allowed to pay for
modifications to vehicles and homes for disabled victims, for example. But repairing or replacing property would be
forbidden, except for locks and windows, and medical prostheses.
Victim Cooperation. You must “promote victim
cooperation with the reasonable requests of law enforcement authorities,” but
this does not mean you need to require a police report in every instance.
You’re free to be flexible, taking into account the victim’s health and safety
concerns, her age and psychological condition, as well as cultural and
linguistic barriers. Requiring that
sexual assault victims only submit to a forensic examination is enough; so are
reports to child and adult protective services. Essentially, you’re free to interpret what “victim cooperation”
means in your own discretion, so long as you do something to promote it.
Supplantation. You can’t
use federal funds to supplant state funds otherwise available for compensating
victims; however, simply spending your VOCA grant is never considered
supplantation. As a practical matter,
no state has ever been accused of supplantation, even though the vagaries of
state budgets may mean reductions and increases of state funding from one year
to the next.
Nonresidents. You must
offer eligibility to any U.S. citizen victimized in your state, regardless of
where that person is from. (Most states
cover foreign tourists, and even undocumented aliens.) VOCA does not require you to cover your
residents victimized in foreign countries, even if those crimes are
terrorism. OVC has its own program to
compensate victims of international terrorism.
Federal Crimes. You must
cover victims of federal crimes, to the same extent you’d cover a victim of
that crime if it had occurred under state jurisdiction. This doesn’t mean you have to cover all
federal crimes, such as nonviolent or white-collar offenses; but only that you
can’t exclude someone just because the crime happened to occur in a national
park, or on an Indian reservation, or a military base.
Unjust Enrichment. You
can’t deny domestic violence victims solely because they share a residence with
the offender or because they’re in the same family. However, you can deny a claim if you believe your payment would
“unjustly enrich” an offender substantially (for example, if he is living with
the victim, and the payment would be appropriated by him or used to support him
in a substantial way), so long as you have written rules that guide your
decision making in this area.
Delinquent Federal Criminal Debt. You’re instructed by VOCA
to deny payments to federal offenders who are delinquent in paying fines and
restitution – but this provision becomes effective only if and when the
U.S. ever develops a readily accessible database providing criminal debt
tracking information. Don’t worry about
this one for now or in the foreseeable future; such a database is not even in
development.
Federal Benefit Programs.
One VOCA provision is directed more toward federal benefit programs than state
compensation programs: VOCA says your payment of compensation to a victim
should not affect that victim’s eligibility for any federal benefit the victim
has been receiving or could qualify for, so long as your payment and that
federal benefit, added together, don’t exceed the victim’s actual loss from the
crime. The federal benefit can’t be
reduced, either. OVC Director John Gillis has sent letters to all relevant
federal agency heads asking for compliance (copies of this correspondence are
available).
Last Payer. Your program is
a last payer in relationship to all federal benefit programs. If a victim’s expense or loss would be
covered by a federal benefit program like Medicaid, Veterans Administration,
Indian Health Services, or Social Security, as well as by you, you “shall not
pay” that compensation, and the federal benefit shall be paid “without regard
to the existence” of your program.
While other federal benefit programs may protest that they also have
last-payer provisions in their governing laws, VOCA wins out, since its
last-payer provision is Congress’s most specific directive on this issue. A Congressional Report also specifically
names Medicaid, V.A., and I.H.S. as examples of programs that should pay first
before state victim compensation.