One day after losing disability pay, she started collecting retirement too
DC worker collected disability and retirement benefits for years. Nobody noticed - until they did.
The District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled on October 8, 2026, that a long-serving DC Department of Corrections employee could not receive temporary total disability (TTD) benefits and federal retirement payments at the same time. The court vacated a lower review board’s ruling and reinstated the agency’s order suspending the worker’s disability benefits.
The worker was hired by the DC Department of Corrections on November 20, 1972. In June 1993, she suffered an emotional breakdown following what the court described as “extended on the job harassment and retaliatory treatment.” She began receiving TTD and medical benefits under the District’s workers’ compensation program, established under the Comprehensive Merit Personnel Act (CMPA).
In May 2006, the District cut her TTD benefits over an alleged failure to comply with vocational rehabilitation. One day later, she applied for federal retirement benefits through the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) - available to her because she was hired before the September 30, 1987, cutoff for District employees grandfathered into the federal system.
She also appealed the TTD termination. She won. Her disability benefits came back. But she kept collecting the retirement payments too.
It took the Office of Risk Management (ORM) until January 2020 to discover the overlap. ORM terminated her TTD benefits “immediately,” asserting she had “no legal right” to receive both. She appealed again. An administrative law judge sided with her, reasoning that federal retirement benefits do not come “from” the District. The Compensation Review Board agreed.
The Court of Appeals did not. The court found that while the retirement payments were administered federally, they originated from the worker’s District employment. The District had withheld a portion of her salary and matched it from its own funds, transmitting both to the federal retirement fund. Those benefits, the court held, could “only properly be said to come ‘from’ the District.”
The court also noted the CMPA’s dual-compensation bar was modeled almost word for word on the equivalent federal statute, which clearly prohibits federal employees from receiving workers’ compensation and retirement annuities at the same time. Allowing a District employee to do what a federal employee could not, the court found, would be “incongruous.”
For HR teams managing public sector benefits, the takeaway is practical: if your workers’ compensation program and retirement system both trace back to the same employer, dual collection is a compliance exposure - even when the retirement check arrives from a different level of government.
