Veterans Post: Backlogged claims actually go down

Decrease despite shutdown

By Freddy Groves
| 2:15 p.m. November 6, 2013

Winter Park - Maitland Observer
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Despite the projections that the number of backlogged claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs would climb during the recent government shutdown (so said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki), it wasn’t as bad as expected. In a pre-shutdown reprieve, the VA was granted an exemption, and claims processing stayed up and running.

However, during the shutdown, processors weren’t able to continue working their 20 hours per month mandatory overtime to whittle away at the backlog (claims that have been sitting for more than 125 days). That mandatory overtime has been a key component to getting the backlog reduced, and will stop completely in November.

One would think that a lot of claims work was left undone. But the Monday Workload Report shows that despite the shutdown, the canceled overtime and all the doom-and-gloom projections, the number of claims actually went down. Granted, they didn’t go down by much, but they did go down. (If you want to view the archived file of Monday Morning Reports, go online to www.vba.va.gov/reports/mmwr/)

Remember that before the shutdown, the VA hadn’t met its own projections of how fast the number of claims would fall on their way to eliminating the backlog. It didn’t meet its own goal to the tune of approximately 100,000 claims for fiscal year 2013. (Some in Congress were a bit annoyed about that, since the VA had been granted $1.59 billion specifically to bring down the backlog.)

Bottom line: If the mandatory overtime is canceled permanently, then yes, the number of delayed claims can continue to go down, but it will be at a very slow rate. While the VA is still aiming for 2015 to clean up that backlog, it’s looking increasingly unlikely for that to happen.