The Veterans Affairs Department needs stronger controls over its claims processing to meet its 30-day goal to provide transition assistance for seriously disabled veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, VA’s inspector general said in a recent report. Also, the department should improve its outreach to make sure it informs all service members and veterans about available benefits to ease their transition to civilian life, the report adds.
The benefits claims of seriously disabled veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are caught between the processes of VA and the Defense Department as the departments try to cooperate more to make their procedures seamless, but VA must exert more oversight to accelerate the process, according to the findings of the report released July 17.
“Claims processing delays can cause veterans financial hardship by depriving them of compensation they may need to successfully transition from military service to civilian life,” said Belinda Finn, VA’s assistant inspector general for auditing.
The 30-day goal, expanded outreach and case management for veterans’ claims were among recommendations in 2007 of the presidential Task Force on Returning Global War on Terror Heroes and the Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors.
The IG’s office evaluated a sample of claims dated from fiscal 2006 until mid-fiscal (January) 2008. VA regional offices processed only 24 percent of 4,969 sampled compensation claims of seriously disabled veterans in 30 days, the report states. Of the remaining claims that took longer than one month, 55 percent took up to six months and 21 percent took up to one year to process.
To improve timeliness, the Veterans Benefits Administration should press more strongly for the Defense Department to provide data to identify seriously disabled veterans and monitoring case-managed claims, the report states.
Although DOD had agreed to regularly provide VA with service member data, including injury and illness classification codes, VA said it had not as of January received any of the Army Surgeon General reports. DOD said VA was waiting for the codes until it could receive them through a planned online Veterans Tracking Application, according to the report.
Also, case management procedures require that VA's regional offices communicate with veterans to notify them of the status of their claims and monitor claims’ progress through the system to assure that they met the 30-day goal. The IG found that case management had minimal effect on the timeliness of processing times. The process-monitoring tool that VA field offices used did not clearly show and summarize timeliness information, the IG said.
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