The CNA study found that there are more and increasingly complex claims being made. The VA received about 719,000 compensation claims in fiscal 2008, a 53 percent increase from fiscal 1999, with 16 percent involving eight or more issues.
According to CNA, frontline employees and managers overwhelmingly agree that work credits assigned to each individual action do not always reflect the amount of time needed to perform them.
A VBA field operations official, Diana Rubens, told the panel that newly revised VSR performance standards align individual performance targets with national targets and require local quality reviews.
According to Rubens, the agency has also implemented a revised performance plan that only credits actions that advance a claim to the next stage of a claim’s life cycle.
VBA said it is actively pursuing additional initiatives to eliminate the claims backlog while achieving a 98 percent quality level, and it established pilot initiatives to improve claims processing and services to veterans at operations in Little Rock, Ark., Providence, R.I., and Pittsburgh.
