Criminal Injury
How Long Will My Criminal Injury Claim Take?
The question of how long an appeal to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority will take to be processed depends, in large part, upon the nature of the criminal injury itself. As soon as you make your application to the board they will get in touch with the relevant bodies:
- The police, to whom you reported the crime as soon as you were physically able.
- The doctor or hospital responsible for treating the injuries.
- Anyone else with relevant information - i.e. witnesses, members of your family, counsellors who are helping you to cope with the after effects of the crime.
The information provided by the police will be used to decide if you are eligible for criminal injury compensation, and the medical details will build a picture of the precise details of your injuries, their severity, and the long term effect they are likely to have on you. The authority warns that it may take a year or more to reach a final decision. Calculating expenses, loss of earnings and extrapolating these figures into the future may render the case more complex and thus take more time. Once a decision has been reached the authority will make a single payment for all of the compensation payable, known as a Final Award. If the calculations required to reach a final figure are highly complex and time consuming, due to such things as medical complications, but you are clearly eligible for compensation, then the authority will pay some of the money in the form of an interim payment. Whatever this amount, it will be deducted from your overall payment once the overall compensation amount has been decided upon.
