While many federal employees are facing furloughs because of U.S. budget cutbacks, many Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employees are facing the opposite – mandatory overtime.
The reason has been splashed all over the news lately. To address public outrage, the VA implemented an initiative designed to eliminate the oldest initial claims from its backlog. I discussed this initiative in a prior blog available here. The backlog was reaching an alarming number (almost one million!), and while waiting for their benefits, many veterans were vulnerable to foreclosures, bankruptcy, and severe medical issues – situations that could have been mitigated or avoided if they were provided with the benefits to which they were entitled.
In Spring, the VA mandated a minimum of 75 hours of overtime for Regional Office claims processors between May 15 and September 30. In late June the VA reported that 65,000 claims have been reduced from the backlog.
While the backlog initiative is wonderful in theory, I’m leery of this “quick fix” to the backlog. Veterans don’t want to wait years for their claims to be resolved, but they also don’t want their claims improperly adjudicated. With mandatory overtime and national pressure on VA claims processors, I have to think this high stress environment would foster mistakes.
Also, I worry about how this affects other claims. The backlog initiative applies only to initial claims – not claims that have been remanded or appealed. Those claimants have been waiting longer than veterans with pending initial claims, and due to the initiative’s allocation of resources towards the backlog…they will continue to wait. I was recently informed by an official at one of the ROs that for now, no appeals are being processed at that particular RO. Not that they’re being processed more slowly, or that they are lower priority – no appeals are being processed, period.
When I asked why this was so, the VA official told me something that stuck with me. She relayed that the focus is only on initial claims because veterans with pending appeals have “already been through the system.”
I understand her point, but what about veterans who are still in the system through no fault of their own?
Take, for example, one claim with which I’m familiar. In 2004, the Board of Veterans’ Appeals remanded the veteran’s claim, ordering the RO to provide an “adequate” medical examination. Five years later, this examination was provided. In a subsequent decision, the VA disregarded the opinion (which found the veteran’s disability was service-connected) and denied the claim. It has been over two years since the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims ruled this was in error and remanded the claim to the RO, and no progress has been made in scheduling a new medical examination.
In this instance, the veteran did nothing wrong. Yet since his claim is characterized as an appeal, it is in limbo while the RO concentrates on the disability backlog. Has he really had his chance in the system? I don’t believe so.
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