A “tsunami” of appeals on veterans’ disability claims is looming, as the Department of Veterans Affairs’ progress in reducing its backlog of claims is coming at the expense of resolving older appeals, members of a house VA subcommittee said Thursday.
Veterans file appeals on their disability claims when mistakes in their paperwork or disability ratings block them from access to needed benefits or care. The wait to get through an appeal on one of these older claims is a process of not months, but years, said Rep. Ralph Abraham, R-La., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs subcommittee on disability assistance.
“Appealed claims are often put on the back burner in favor of deciding initial claims,” Abraham said. “Veterans in my district wait six, eight, 10 years,” to get an appeal decision, he said. “I find that unacceptable.”
And as more veterans from recent conflicts enter the VA system, the backlog is likely to increase, said subcommittee ranking member Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev.
An “impending appeals tsunami” lies ahead, she said.
A panel of Veterans Benefits Administration leaders told the subcommittee Thursday that it has a “large inventory” of appeals — about 383,000 appeals from veterans who are held up from receiving proper care by incorrect information, such as their disability rating, in their files.
Veterans Benefits Administration Vice Chairman Laura Eskenazi said the increase in the appeals backlog is a reflection that the VA was more active in 2014, processing 1.3 million claims last year compared with 1.17 million in 2013. About 10 percent of claims each of those years ended up in the appeals process, she said.
As the agency “completes more claims, the volume of appeals proportionally increases,” she said.
But the numbers hide the reality that a claim is not a start-and-finish process. Each claim can face so many steps along the way that for the veterans stuck in the system, the wait takes years, not months.
Beth McCoy, deputy undersecretary at the Veterans Benefits Administration, said the agency is hiring an additional 300 full-time employees to shrink the appeals backlog.
But Titus said the agency wasn’t doing enough to reduce the backlog.
“We’re trading a claims backlog for an appeals backlog,” Titus said. “We’re trading the devil for the witch.”
