Military Update: Shinseki vows action to speed claims, serve veterans

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Military Update: Shinseki vows action to speed claims, serve veterans
By Tom Philpott, Special to Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Saturday, February 7, 2009

The new secretary of Veterans Affairs, retired Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, got a recent tour of the paperwork battlefield on which VA claim adjudicators serve every day. It was a bracing scene -- literally.

“You walk into one of our rooms where…decisions are being made about disabilities for veterans (and) see individuals sitting at a desk with stacks of paper that go up half way to the ceiling. And as they finish one pile, another pile comes in,” Shinseki, former Army chief of staff, told the House Veterans Affairs Committee Feb. 4.

“There are 11,100 people doing this…good people, hired to do a rather challenging job in which they are trying to apply judgment to situations that occurred years ago,” Shinseki said. Paperwork, he added, doesn’t draw out “a full appreciation for the context of combat.”

The army of claim adjudicators is equal in size to the 82nd Airborne Division, Shinseki said. It grew by 4000 in the last two years. Another 1100 will be hired this year to address VA’s claims backlog. It’s “a brute force solution” to a problem best solved with an electronic claim processing system. Information technology, he said, could produce the “timely, accurate, consistent decision-making” that veterans deserve.

“If we don’t…create a paperless process,” Shinseki told lawmakers, “I’ll report a year from now that we hired more people to do this.”


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=60529