N002482
Dear Mr. Kenneth L. Zwick
The following are my objections to the Victims' Compensation Fund:
The airline bailout act gave
the airlines $15 billion of taxpayers' money and capped the airlines'
liabili-
ty for the 9/11 crashes at the limits of their insurance coverage. It set up the Fund so the airlines'
bailout
would not come at the expense of the victims' families.
DOJ has ignored the fundamental mandate of the act to provide full and fair compensation to
victims
and their families, and instead created a formulaic federal program based on irrelevant concepts
more
familiar
to the bureaucracy.
. The DOJ's proposed awards for non-economic damages ($250,000 per victims plus $50,000
for a
spouse and each dependent) are only-tenth the level pain in comparable cases. For example, a
spouse
was
awarded $5 million in non-economic damages in a lawsuit arising out of Lockerbie.
. Congress explicitly enumerated a broad range of non-economic damages for which victims
and
their
families shall be compensated.
. DOJ ignored this, and based its presumed awards on a military group life insurance program
(SGLI)
with a maximum policy of $250,000, and federal statute providing $250,000 to families of fallen
public
safe-
ty officers-on top of other amounts they may receive.
. DOJ's approach assumes that Congress intended the non-economic damages to be illusory,
because a
$250,000 SGLI payment for a serviceman killed at the Pentagon would wipe out those damages
under
the col-
lateral offset requirement.
. DOJ's proposed awards for economic damages grossly underestimate actual losses, because
DOJ relied
on outdated, inapplicable work-life and life-cycle earnings data. Forensic economists have
discovered
other
serious flaws in DOJ's methodology.
. DOJ underestimates promotions and other increases in earnings for victims. It relied on
federal
civil
service and military retirement system boards that track federal worker incomes and pension
requirements, not
the higher-paying private sector career paths.
. DOJ's reliance on past 3 years of income (which the Special Master "may average") looks
suspiciously
like a federal pension approach, rather than considering the likely income-earning potential of the
decedent, as
is routinely done in wrongful death cases.
. The regulations arbitrarily cap a victim's income at $225,000 a year, cutting some families'
compensa-
tion by over 50%. As a result, many widows will have to sell their homes, deplete their
children's
college
funds, and give up their plans of being full-time parents while their children are young.
. A family's award may be increased above the "presumptive" award only by a showing of
"extraordi-
nary circumstances" - beyond those suffered by other victims or victims' families. This makes
the
hearing or
appeal to the Special Master a mere charade.
. The low levels of the presumptive awards will result in many family members receiving little
or
noth-
ing from the Fund, once the collateral source deductions (which are not required in a court case)
are
made.
. DOJ should fulfill, rather than flout, the act's intent by revising its rules to compensate victims
and
their families for the types of damages specified by Congress, at levels comparable to those
provided in
the
tort system the Fund was designed to replace.
Respectfully yours,
Individual Comment
Fair Haven, NJ