IG Claims One-third of Finalized Claims Inaccurate

The House Veterans Affairs Committee (HVAC) held a hearing this week to review the VA’s progress in achieving the goal of ending its disability compensation claims backlog by 2015 and explore claims of whistleblower retaliation and “cooking the books” within VBA. At the hearing, Allison Hickey, VA Undersecretary for Benefits, insisted that the claims backlog has been significantly reduced. The VA has set a goal of processing all disability claims within 125 days with 98 percent accuracy. The VA claims that the disability claims backlog has been reduced by 55 percent, from more than 600,000 pending claims beyond 125 days early last year to 275,000 claims today. HVAC Chairman Jeff Miller (Fla.) and Assistant Inspector General for the VA Linda Halliday said they don’t believe the VA’s reported statistics.

Hickey indicated that VA completed a record 1.2 million disability rating claims in 2013, and that the agency is on track to complete more than 1.3 million rating claims this year and pay a total of $67 billion in benefits. Hickey also said that more than 90 percent of the claims are being processed electronically. The IG office also reports that over a two month period, nearly one-third of the adjudicated claims were inaccurate.

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