Veterans with disability claims pending in the Department of Veterans Affairs‘ Houston office were left without a decision or explanation after a worker inappropriately dumped their cases, according to the agency’s inspector general.
The IG confirmed the employee was improperly removing cases or changing the electronic records on claims without taking the proper action to render a decision, the report released Monday said. An internal review team at the VA Regional Office in Houston reached the same conclusion.
The employee inappropriately cleared 44 percent of the cases reviewed by the IG, falsely making it appear the claims were completed.
“These actions had the adverse impact of misrepresenting the [regional office’s] claims inventory and timeliness measures, while impairing the [regional office’s] ability to monitor and manage its workload,” the IG said. “Further, some veterans may never have received decisions on their claims if the VARO’s independent review team had not identified the inappropriate actions.”
The employee said he was not instructed to improperly discard claims, and that other staff were not told to use the improper techniques.
The IG investigation focused on one individual, and did not address whether the practice is widespread in the Houston office or nationally.
There is intense pressure on VA to eliminate the backlog of disability benefits claims. Agency officials have vowed since 2009 that all claims would be processed within 125 days with 98 percent accuracy by 2015.
But after that promise was made by then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, the backlog ballooned, peaking about March 2013 when more than 70 percent of nearly 900,000 claims were older than 125 days.
The true extent of the delays was first documented by the Washington Examiner in a five-part series in 2013, “Making America’s Heroes Wait.”
VA made some efforts to streamline the process, ordered processors to work overtime and prioritized the oldest claims to bring down the backlog. Today, about 47 percent of the 520,465 claims are backlogged, according to the agency’s most recent report.
Veterans’ groups have warned that to meet its deadline on backlogged claims, VA is rushing through cases riddled with errors, forcing veterans into appeals that can take years to resolve.
