The Retirement and Social Security Law contains various provisions designed to assist a member or beneficiary in obtaining disability retirement or death benefits by creating rebuttable presumptions that an injury, illness or disease was incurred in the performance and discharge of duties and, in some instances, as the natural and proximate result of an accident not caused by the member’s own willful negligence. Once brought into play, these presumptions are rebuttable by competent evidence. Many of the presumption provisions require that the member must have successfully passed a physical examination upon entry into employment that failed to disclose evidence of the injury, illness or disease. The requirement, which must be satisfied in order to raise the presumption, is intended to disqualify those individuals who clearly sustained the injury or contracted the illness or disease prior to obtaining the employment upon which membership is based. However, from time to time, the member and/or employer are unable to provide evidence of a successful pre-employment physical despite a diligent search for records and acknowledgement that an examination took place. With the passage of time, records of examinations may be purged under Records Retention schedules or simply lost or destroyed. In one particularly poignant example, shortly after the enactment of chapters 93 and 104 of the Laws of 2005, which created the disability presumption for the participants in rescue, recovery and clean-up operations following the World Trade Center disaster, the Retirement System was confronted with a situation wherein the medical records of the Port Authority of New York – New Jersey were destroyed in the towers collapse. To avoid the untenable outcome of denying the presumption to Port Authority Police Officers, the Retirement System accepted a written statement from the Port Authority’s Chief Medical Officer detailing the examinations, including medical, given during the police officer selection process with his assurance that only those who successfully complete all requirements are considered for appointment as a Port Authority Police Officer. A further complicating factor for the World Trade Center presumption was the realization that not every otherwise eligible member was required to undergo a pre-employment physical at the time of employment. It simply is not a requirement of many public positions. As a result, the World Trade Center presumption was amended in 2008 to provide that an authorized release of all relevant medical records could substitute when the member had not had an examination. Although helpful to some, the amendment did not address those who had undergone examinations for which the records were subsequently lost or destroyed. It seems highly unlikely that the Legislature, in providing presumptions to assist members in obtaining disability benefits, intended to bar those whose examination records were no longer available through no fault of their own. This part is promulgated to address this issue.