COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
VA's ability to provide benefits worsens
Chris Adams, McClatchy Newspapers
Dec. 01, 2006
WASHINGTON - The Department of Veterans Affairs is falling behind in its
efforts to provide prompt disability benefits for veterans nationwide, as
its backlog of cases continues to grow, new reports show.
In fact, the department's performance slipped in the past year even though
its workload was lower than anticipated.
For its part, the VA said that its productivity did drop last year but that
things should improve next year, as a new batch of employees gets fully
trained and up to speed.
"We've made an investment in 2006 in terms of hiring a lot of new
employees," said Michael Walcoff, one of the department's top benefits
officials. "We feel very confident that when they are trained, they will be
very productive."
The performance measures are contained in the VA's annual accountability
report sent to Congress and the president in November. The VA said it was
able to meet many of its performance "targets" for the year, even though
several of them are far from the VA's long-term goals.
Earlier this year, top VA officials, including Secretary James Nicholson,
told Congress they were anticipating a huge increase in claims for
disability compensation and pensions, due to the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, continuing claims from older veterans and a special outreach
program.
In testifying to Congress in February that the VA was "focused on
delivering timely and accurate benefits," Secretary Nicholson and other VA
officials said the department expected to receive 910,126 new claims and
complete a decision on 838,566.
Instead, the VA received far fewer claims - 806,382 - and it produced a
decision on 774,378, or 8 percent fewer than expected, VA data show.
As productivity dropped, the VA's closely watched backlog of claims went
up, and has continued to rise since the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
It now tops 400,000.
For years, the VA has tried to get this backlog of pending cases to
250,000; the figure topped 400,000 in 2002, and after driving the number
down to 253,000 the VA boasted about its success. Now, most of those gains
have been erased.
"They haven't made a lot of progress in the last year," said Randy Reese,
national service director for Disabled American Veterans. "I know it's on
their plate, and I know they are worried about it."
Another closely watched measure is the time taken to decide each claim, and
in the past year that average processing time rose to 177 days, 10 days
longer than in the previous year. It was the second straight year
performance dropped.
The VA wants to process claims in 125 days, a target that had been relaxed
from prior goals that aimed to bring the average to 100 or fewer days.
To explain the processing slowdown from 2005 to 2006, the VA in its recent
report to Congress gave three reasons: a concentration on older claims, the
training of new staff, and the fact that it had "received a greater-than-
expected number of claims in 2006."
In fact, the opposite was true.
As early as February 2005, the VA anticipated receiving 818,076 claims in
fiscal 2006, and Nicholson in February 2006 upped that to 910,000 claims -
both above the actual tally of 806,382. (The VA this week told McClatchy
Newspapers the report to Congress was in error and shouldn't have used the
word "expected.")
The VA maintains a blizzard of measures, goals and targets designed to help
improve service to the nation's 25 million veterans and their families. The
VA's health system generally did a better job of meeting its goals than did
the benefits system, which spends more than $30 billion dispensing
disability, pension, education, and other compensation.
An analysis of the VA's performance report shows the benefits division
improved its performance from 2005 to 2006 in one-third of its key measures
and met its long-term targets in less than a third.
Among additional measures:
-The time to process education benefit claims slipped from 33 days to 40
days, compared with the long-term goal of processing claims in 10 days. The
department said this week it has already brought the education backlog down.
-The error rate on disability claims improved, from 16 percent to 12
percent, although it remains far from the long-term goal of a 2 percent
error rate.
-The processing time for VA pension claims increased from 68 days to 92
days, far from the long-term goal of 60 days.
-The time to handle the average appeal of a disability decision grew from
622 days to 657 days, compared with the long-term goal of 365 days.
-The percent of time it turns in reports to Congress by the due date
dropped from 21 percent to 13 percent, compared with the long-term goal of
100 percent.
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