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Vets group offers idea to speed VA claims

Veterans could receive disability benefits faster, with fewer errors, if new Veterans Affairs Department employees worked exclusively on simple claims and experienced employees handled everything else, says a Disabled American Veterans official.

John Wilson, DAV’s assistant national legislative director, said new employees take too long to process claims and are prone to mistakes. If VA wants to move faster and with more accuracy, he said, new employees should be restricted to processing benefits claims prepared with the help of a veterans service officer from one of the major veterans groups.

More experienced VA workers could handle claims that had not been pre-screened, Wilson said in an interview and in testimony provided to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Wilson’s suggestion comes as VA and Congress grapple with ways to handle an ever-increasing backlog of claims that leaves veterans waiting, on average, 160 days for an initial decision. Making the wait even more painful is the fact that the initial decision is often wrong, and a veteran can spend up to two years appealing a claim.

A recent report by VA’s Inspector General found that up to one-quarter of the claims decisions made at a Roanoke, Va., regional office were in error for a variety of reasons, Wilson said.

VA statistics show the overall error rate across the department at about 18 percent.

Wilson said the current claims system has “virtually no in-process quality control that could detect errors before they create undue delays.”

VA is working on several pilot programs to speed claims processing; the House and Senate veterans’ affairs committees also are working on ideas.

The short-term fix, included in the 2011 budget, is to hire more claims processors — what Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee chairman, likes to call the “brute force” method of managing claims.

The budget request calls for 4,000 more permanent claims processors in VA, but not all would be completely new; about 1,800 represent the conversion of temporary jobs to permanent positions.

Filner said hiring more people and increasing claims automation may help, but he is holding out for more fundamental changes in the claims process, including the idea of automatically approving some simple claims without delay. He says spot-checking a sample of claims, similar to how the Internal Revenue Service audits only a portion of federal tax returns, would make a far bigger impact on getting money into the hands of veterans faster.