Legal Meets Practical

On January 22, the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (VA) Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs held a hearing to address the litany of issues regarding disability compensation claims pending before the VA Regional Offices and the Board of Veterans’ Appeals.

The takeaway? Getting your claim bounced to the appeals queue is like being sentenced to purgatory.

One of the most vocal contributors during the hearing was the American Legion. It noted that decisions on about 288,000 veterans’ benefits claims have been appealed. “With appealed claims, you can no longer think in terms of how many days you’ve been waiting,” the Legion stated in its written testimony. “Appealed claims are measured in terms of how many years the veteran has been waiting.”

Veterans who have appealed their disability claims wait an average of 1,937 days for final decisions, according to numbers listed in the VA’s Monday Morning Workload Report of January 5. That time span is about 500 days longer than a standard four-year enlistment in the military. When these claims are granted, there is no penalty assessed to the VA for failures that caused the delay – not even interest. It is merely backdated to the originally-filed date. (There is, however, a penalty assigned to the veteran who misses a deadline or drops the ball in some way – if a form is not sent in on time, the veteran will lose out on the originally-filed date).

Zachary Hearn, on behalf of the Legion, told the Subcommittee that nearly 75 percent of claims presented at the BVA have either been improperly denied at a VA regional office, or inadequately developed and denied prematurely. Many claims were also appealed because claims adjudicators failed to follow their legally mandated duties to assist veterans.

“While the VA asserts it does not place a higher priority on the amount of claims adjudicated,” Hearn said, “its current work-credit structure does not address accuracy in its metric, which rewards speed over quality.”

Once a BVA judge remands a claim, instructions are forwarded to VA’s Appeals Management Center for further development. Hearn said these remands, or returned claims, come with clear and distinct instructions from the judges, yet the Legion consistently sees cases remanded multiple times, despite the instructions. The organization refers to it as  the “hamster wheel” of remands, where a veteran remains in adjudication purgatory, waiting for VA to conduct proper development and finally render a decision.

While VA has published accuracy rates above 90 percent for claims processing, the Government Accountability Office reported last November that the Veterans Benefits Administration “does not follow accepted statistical practices and thus generates imprecise accuracy data.”

While we are dealing with a broken, rusted process that has shown little signs of improvement (including as it relates to the VA’s fully-developed claims process), at least suggestions for positive change are in the public record. As the Legion noted, if the VA eliminated its work-credit structure (which emphasizes quantity of claims adjudication rather than quality), this would lower the error rate.

And, while this should be obvious, the VA simply needs more claims personnel, and more training. I often interface with the folks at Roanoke in my practice, and while I have had the pleasure to speak with many individuals who truly care about the mission at hand, the simple truth is they’re overworked and understaffed. That can’t be good for the morale.

Access the live webcast of the January 22 testimony here.

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