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Monday, July 1, 2013

Congressman Miller missed a few things on his VA claims history lesson

"I want to show you how it has increased since then 327,275 in June of 04. In June of 08 it was 404,161 and 913,690 in June of 2012."

Congressman Miller missed a few things on his VA claims history lesson.

January 2007 Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have already filed 176,000 new disability claims, but have run into a VA backlog of more than 400,000 cases.

VBA's pending compensation and claims backlog stood at 816,211 as of January 2008, up 188,781 since 2004

April 2008 “Since 2006, the number of claims has grown 15 percent. The amount of time it takes to make decisions on disability claims is two to three year. On an average, it takes four years to get an appeals decision.”

June 2008 VA reported 879,291 claims were in backlog
July 2008 there was this report
The title of the House committee report sums up what happened: “Die or Give Up Trying: How Poor Contractor Performance, Government Mismanagement and the Erosion of Quality Controls Denied Thousands of Disabled Veterans Timely and Accurate Retroactive Retired Pay Awards.”

The report by the majority staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform domestic policy panel, released Tuesday, concluded that at least 28,283 disabled retirees were denied retroactive pay awards because rushed efforts to clear a huge backlog of claims led program administrators to stop doing quality assurance checks on the claims decisions.

And of the original 133,057 potentially eligible veterans, 8,763 died before their cases could be reviewed for retroactive payments, according to the report.


August 2008, there was this VA expects to receive almost 900,000 benefits claims this year, and has a backlog of about 400,000 claims. In mid-July, VA officials reported that they were beginning to make a dent in the backlog because they were hiring new claims workers and using better training and a more efficient claims management process.

And in March of 2009 there was this
A new report about Veterans Affairs Department employees squirreling away tens of thousands of unopened letters related to benefits claims is sparking fresh concerns that veterans and their survivors are being cheated out of money.

VA officials acknowledge further credibility problems based on a new report of a previously undisclosed 2007 incident in which workers at a Detroit regional office turned in 16,000 pieces of unprocessed mail and 717 documents turned up in New York in December during amnesty periods in which workers were promised no one would be penalized.

Since we didn't fix it back then and after it gets better this time, how long do you think it will take before it gets bad all over again?

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