VA benefits production quotas called into question

A Department of Veterans Affairs official touted stepped-up efforts to process veterans' benefits claims on Capitol Hill this week, but ran into accusations from lawmakers and a veterans' organization that employees at VA regional offices denied claims with little review in order to meet stringent production quotas.

The Veterans Benefits Administration oversees the processing of veterans' benefits, paying out nearly $25 billion each year. The VBA's claims processing system has been repeatedly criticized in recent years as slow and inefficient.

During a hearing before the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Benefits on Thursday, VA Benefits Undersecretary Daniel Cooper told lawmakers that production had dramatically increased and the claims processing mechanism was slowly turning in the right direction thanks to the adoption 34 recommendations of the 14-member VA Claims Processing Task Force, a group formed in 2001 to find ways to overhaul the VBA.

Since last November, VBA has created a special "tiger team" to close out claims more than one year old, added production goals to regional office performance plans, and established specialized processing teams at each veterans service center.

According to Cooper, over the past three months, VBA has processed claims more quickly than it has in years. By the end of May, the tiger team had processed 10,162 claims, the majority of them for veterans older than 70, that had been pending for at least a year. The agency also reduced its backlog of unprocessed claims to 389,000 as of June 3, down from 430,000 in March.

"It's not a success story yet. We will always experience setbacks," Cooper said. "[But] the results to date have been encouraging."

However, an American Legion official told the panel that during a recent visit to the St. Petersburg, Fla., regional office a quality review team was "confronted with graphic evidence of premature and erroneous denials of claims, a general lack of compliance with Veterans' Claims Assistance Act rules, and other types of inappropriate action." The VCAA, passed in 2000, is designed to ensure that veterans get help in preparing their claims. "It almost appears as part of an orchestrated policy of manipulation of the station's production figures as a means of meeting its mandated production quotas," said John Fischl, director of the American Legion's national veterans affairs and rehabilitation commission. Cooper said he was unaware of the American Legion's findings, and promised to look into the allegations, but Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., pressed him on the issue, asking if he knew whether some regional offices were "cherry picking" cases by focusing on the most easily resolved claims to meet production goals. "I've talked to regional offices and told them this is not something we condone," Cooper said, adding that he hadn't personally received concrete information about claims processing misdeeds. "If any of the service organizations have facts, point me in the right direction."