10 U.S.C. § 14107 — Information furnished by the Secretary concerned to promotion boards

(a) Integrity of the Promotion Selection Board Process. (1) The Secretary of Defense must write regulations governing what information goes to selection boards convened under section 14101(a), and those regulations must apply the same way across every military department. A department's Secretary can add supplementary regulations, but only with the Defense Secretary's written approval first. (2) A board can only receive information about a specific eligible officer from four sources: information from the officer's official military personnel file, provided under the Defense Secretary's regulations; other information the department's Secretary reviews and determines is substantiated, relevant, and could reasonably and materially affect the board's decision; information the officer sends the board under this section or section 14106 (including the officer's comments on their own file); and a factual summary of all of that, prepared by administrative staff to help the board's work. (3) For an officer being considered for promotion above lieutenant colonel (or, in the Navy, above commander), any credible adverse information -- including a substantiated adverse finding from a documented investigation -- must be given to the board, following the Defense Secretary's standards. That information must reach the board, and each individual board member, at every stage of the board's work, alongside the officer's personnel file. For officers being considered for promotion at or below major general (or, in the Navy, rear admiral), this same requirement can instead be satisfied by convening a special selection board for that officer under section 14502a. (4) All information given to the board under paragraphs (2) and (3) must be available to every board member and made part of the board's official record. It must be communicated in writing, or as an audio or video recording -- and if it's a recording, a written transcript must also become part of the record. (5) These rules about limited, vetted information don't apply to routine administrative processing information the board's own staff gives it, but only to the extent that spoken communication is necessary to help the board do its work. (6) Information described in paragraph (2)(B), (C), or (D), or in paragraph (3), given to one promotion board, cannot be given to a later promotion board unless it has since been properly placed in the officer's official file, or it's given to the later board following the same paragraph (2) or (3) process again. (7) Before information described in paragraph (2)(B) or (3) goes to a board, the department's Secretary must make sure the officer sees it and gets a reasonable chance to comment on it to the board. If the officer can't see it because it's classified, the officer must, as much as practical, get an appropriate summary instead. (b) Information To Be Furnished. The department's Secretary must give a promotion board convened under section 14101(a): for a mandatory promotion board, the maximum number of officers in each competitive category the board may recommend for promotion (set under section 14307); the name of every officer under consideration in each competitive category; each officer's pertinent records, as the Secretary determines; guidance about the armed force's need for officers with particular skills, including -- except for a vacancy promotion board -- a minimum or maximum number of such officers within a category; and any other information or guidelines the Secretary decides the board needs to do its job. (c) Limitation on Modifying Furnished Information. Once a board submits its report to the department's Secretary under section 14109(a), the information or guidelines already given to it cannot be changed, taken back, or added to. There's one exception: if the Secretary sends the report back to the board under section 14110(a) because the board acted contrary to law, regulation, or guidelines, the Secretary can modify, withdraw, or add to that information as part of the written explanation sent back with the report. (d) Officers in Health-Professions Competitive Categories. Under uniform Defense Department regulations, when a promotion board is reviewing officers in a health-professions competitive category for promotion below colonel (or, in the Navy Reserve, below captain), the department's Secretary must include guidance directing the board to weigh the officer's clinical skill as a health professional at least as heavily as the officer's administrative and management skills.