VA, vets groups oppose Akaka proposal on claims - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

VA, vets groups oppose Akaka proposal on claims

The Veterans Affairs Department and major veterans groups showed a united front Wednesday in the battle to reduce the large and growing backlog of benefits claims.

They agree that the 17 percent increase since Jan. 1 in the number of pending claims — including 207,568 pending for more than 125 days — is a sign of serious problems in the claims system.

They also agree that the Claims Processing Improvement Act, S 3517, introduced in June by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee chairman, is not the answer.

Testifying on behalf of major veterans’ groups, Joseph Violante of Disabled American Veterans told Akaka and the veterans’ committee that there are “grave concerns” over the bill, which attempts to improve and speed payments by developing a new standard for determining the severity of disabilities — adopting the same procedures currently used for Social Security disability benefits and workers’ compensation.

Violante said the proposed pilot program assumes, without any proof, that veterans and civilian disability is the same.

“To compare service-connected disabilities to civilian injuries or disabilities fails to value the history and purpose of the veterans’ disability compensation system,” he said.

Michael Walcoff, VA’s acting undersecretary for benefits, said the four-year pilot project at up to 10 regional offices could hurt veterans because it “would not treat veterans equally.”

Walcoff refers to the possibility that a new ratings system could result in veterans in some regions receiving higher ratings — and higher compensation — than those who aren’t part of the pilot.

Akaka, who plans to have his bill considered for a committee vote in early August, said he does not see how his initiative is different than any other pilot project, including the more than 30 projects underway at VA offices that are testing possible improvements to the claims process.

Violante expressed growing frustration that the claims backlog and accuracy problems seem resistant to fixes.

“It seems that no matter how much money or personnel are thrown at this problem, the backlog continues to climb ever higher,” he said. “Even as new laws are enacted, studies completed and pilot programs implemented, one is hard-pressed to find objective evidence that the benefit claims processing system today is performing better than it was five, 10 or 20 years ago.”

VA officials continue to talk of “breaking the back of the backlog” by 2015, although they cannot point to exactly what change will make that possible.

“Our pending claims inventory is rising due to the unprecedented volume of disability claims filed,” said Walcoff, predicting a 13 percent increase in claims this year and an 11 percent increase in 2011.

A former VA benefits chief, Joseph Thompson, said he worries that ideas for faster and more accurate claims processing may look good in pilot projects but would be difficult to duplicate on a larger scale.

“Initial results from the pilots are encouraging, but they have also been engineered to succeed through the use of additional staff, additional expertise or the possibility that the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ is contributing to results,” he said, referring to a behavioral phenomenon in which a person or group performs better when being studied than when not being studied.