Veterans Disability Claims Found Stuffed Away, Again

Oakland VA office botched benefits, forgot about claims
San Francisco Gate
By Vivian Ho
February 18, 2015

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ regional office in Oakland shoved thousands of compensation and disability claims into a filing cabinet without processing them, leaving many veterans or their surviving family members without needed benefits, the agency’s inspector general said in a report issued Wednesday.

The claims, which dated back as far as the mid-1990s, were discovered in 2012 as a national scandal erupted over the VA’s sloppy and slow handling of benefits, which outraged veterans.

The report said the office in 2012 counted 13,184 informal claims for benefits that had been found in the cabinet, with 2,155 requiring “review or action.” Those files were assigned to a special team, the report said, but later, in spring 2014, office workers found a cart of the claims that the team had reviewed but failed to act upon.

“Management determined staff had not taken action on these informal claims as required,” the report stated. Inspectors quoted staffers as saying that processing the claims discovered in the cabinet “was not a priority” in the office.
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