VA still seeking better ways to process benefits claims

It's been five years since the Veterans Benefits Administration was told to develop a method of identifying and sharing best practices for improving claims processing, but the agency's regional offices still haven't received any ideas from headquarters, according to a new General Accounting Office report.

VBA field offices are responsible for processing veterans' disability claims and reporting to the central office. The agency has a history of inaccuracy and inefficiency in claims processing, and has been the subject of several harsh GAO and inspector general reports. In 1995, GAO recommended (HEHS-95-25) that VBA evaluate how regional offices process claims and develop a set of best practices to share across the agency.

"Although the regional offices reported many practices that they believe have helped improve their accuracy ..., VBA has not systematically evaluated and disseminated information on practices that hold promise for improving regional office claims processing performance nationwide," GAO said in its new report, "Veterans' Benefits: Promising Claims-Processing Practices Need to Be Evaluated" (HEHS-00-65).

VBA hasn't been ignoring the problem. In fact, the agency has initiated several efforts to improve claims processing. In 1995, VBA published a report calling for the use of case management to speed the claims process and has since reorganized its field offices into clusters that are supposed to collaborate with one another. In 1997, VBA published a catalog of best practices in all of its business lines and developed a Web site to publish the results.

But the Web site and the catalog have not been updated, and the other evaluation efforts did not focus on testing reported best practices to see which ones really work, GAO said.

"Evaluation of potentially beneficial practices is needed to help regional offices focus their attention on the most promising," the report said.

GAO surveyed managers at 55 regional VBA offices for their ideas on best practices in claims processing. GAO received 238 practices and grouped them into four areas: efforts to improve staff training and accountability; changes in staffing or supervisory structure; efforts to develop evidence; and efforts to improve communication with veterans.

Regional managers had lots of ideas on improving claims speed and accuracy, but their ideas on best practices were based primarily on "observations or inferences, rather than evaluations that could demonstrate a link between a specific practice and improvements in accuracy ...," GAO said.

VBA's Office of Field Operations is working on a Web site that would include best practices, and plans to evaluate the practices before they are posted on the site. But GAO auditors said the effort is still new and hasn't established a time frame or answered many fundamental questions, such as how ideas will be identified and who would evaluate them.

The undersecretary for benefits at the Veterans Affairs Department should take charge of this project and establish a formal plan with deadlines and goals, GAO recommended.

VBA agreed with the bulk of GAO's suggestions and said a draft plan is underway for evaluating best practices from regional offices. Agency officials emphasized that they are committed to improving the operation of the benefits program.