Noteboom The Law Firm

VA System Overwhelmed By Backlogged Claims

April 20, 2010 - The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is completely overwhelmed when it comes to processing disability claims. Depending on who you ask, the amount of backlogged claims sits somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million claims.

Almost half of these claims are taking longer than 120 days to process. Worse, there are thousands of claims taking more than 2 years to complete processing. Veterans needing immediate help are being told to wait because of an antiquated claims processing system.

The amount of disability claims filed over the last 7 years has almost doubled the amount of money the VA is paying out to wounded veterans. The increase was not due to young veterans; it was due mainly to Vietnam and Persian Gulf Veterans filing claims. The future, however, will be owned by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The VA is already compensating almost 200,000 veterans from the current two wars and there is nothing to indicate that number will not greatly inflate in the next 30 years. It was estimated approximately 50,000 soldiers would file for disability when we invaded Iraq in 2003. In 2010, the amount of veterans from those two wars filing for claims is already at 500,000.

In an attempt to correct the backlogged claims, Congress gave hundreds of millions of dollars to hire new employees to do nothing but process claims. On the front it may seem like a good idea but it falls very short of fixing the system itself.

The VA's disability claim system has a litany of problems that add to its overall inefficiency including:

• It generates way too much paperwork;
• It works on diagnoses lagging way behind medical advances;
• It runs on an outmoded computer system; and
• Its computer cannot even verify if veterans have been deployed.

 The backlog will only continue to grow as new illnesses are qualifying for disability benefits and the VA struggles to handle the slew of new psychological claims coming its way. Veterans are not being appropriately compensated, and until the VA system is overhauled and made more efficient, it will continue this way.