Delays on veterans’ disability claims skyrocket
262-day average is highest it has been in past 20 years.
WASHINGTON — The time needed to process veterans’ disability claims shot up by nearly 40 percent last year despite years of effort by federal officials to streamline and shorten the process, records show.
The times necessary to process education benefits and burial benefits, as well as the time needed to wind through the Department of Veterans Affairs appeals process, also increased in fiscal 2012.
The disability-pro- cessing time is closely watched by Congress and veterans’ advocates as a measure of VA efficiency. In fiscal 2012, the average days to complete a VA disability compensation or pension claim rose to 262 days, up from 188 days in fiscal 2011, according to a recently completely VA performance report.
The 262-day average is the highest that measure has been in at least the past 20 years.
The VA’s long-term goal is to get the processing time to an average of 90 days.
“The entire system is a mess,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a support and advocacy group. “They’ve been saying now for 10 years that it’ll get better, and it still doesn’t get better, and we’ve seen tremendous frustration from our members in the last few months. It’s reached a breaking point.”
The VA said it is working to speed its decision-making process and is in the midst of an over- haul of its claims system.
“We recognize that from the standpoint of the veterans, they are waiting too long, and that’s unacceptable,” said Diana Rubens, who helps oversee the VA’s regional offices. “We’ve got to transform how we do things. We know that fixing decades-old problems is not going to be easy.”
America’s veterans are eligible for a range of benefits, from access to the VA’s medical system to lifetime payments for disabilities suffered during military service to access to education, life insurance and home loan programs.
The VA has struggled for years to reduce the waiting times, and each year it emphasizes to Congress that fixing the process is a top priority.
In 2010, for example, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki told the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee that claim time had improved the previous year, dropping from 179 days to 161 days.
In 2011, he told the same committee that “one of VA’s highest priority goals” is to eliminate a backlog of disability cases by 2015 and to ensure all veterans receive a decision in “no more than 125 days.”
In 2012, he told the committee that improvements were being made and that the department was aiming for significant improvements in 2013.
“While too many veterans will still be waiting too long for the benefits they have earned, it does represent a significant improvement in performance over the 2012 estimate of 60 percent of claims more than 125 days old, demonstrating that we are on the right path,” Shinseki said.