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  The Nation's #1 Independent Veterans Web Site Click here to make VA Watchdog dot Org your homepage VA NEWS FLASH from Larry Scott at VA Watchdog dot Org -- 02-26-2008 #4 |
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The Nation's #1 Independent Veterans Web Site Click here to make VA Watchdog dot Org your homepage VA NEWS FLASH from Larry Scott at VA Watchdog dot Org -- 02-26-2008 #4 |
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planning by agency leaders and underfunding by Congress created debilitating backlogs that may take years to resolve.
Story here... http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=3387368 Story below: ------------------------- Buried under backlogs By GREGG CARLSTROM
Social Security Administration staffs are grappling with more than 600,000 disability claims. Regional service centers at the Homeland Security Department’s Citizenship and Immigration Services are buried under more than 1 million citizenship applications. And the Food and Drug Administration is more than
a decade from inspecting every foreign pharmaceutical plant it is obliged
by law to inspect.
At the start of the Bush administration in 2001, VA had more than 400,000 pending claims for disability ratings, which determine a service-disabled veteran’s employability and disability benefits. The department made progress reducing that number: By 2003, the backlog was down to around 250,000. But then the nation went to war. “VA was kind of cruising right along with a certain volume of claims until the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Then the volume of claims increased,” said Belinda Finn, VA’s assistant inspector general for auditing. “We still had the same processes for handling a lower workload, and the system just hasn’t been able to handle the increase in claims.” And so the backlog started creeping up. By 2008, VA once again has more than 400,000 pending claims for a disability rating. About 25 percent of those are officially considered backlogged, meaning they have been pending longer than six months. “The number of claims that we receive each year has been going up pretty steadily,” said Michael Walcoff, VA’s associate deputy undersecretary for field operations. “In 2000, we got 578,000 claims, and last year got 838,000. That’s a pretty significant increase, and certainly some of that can be attributed to the soldiers coming back from [the wars].” And even as the backlog was increasing, VA was trimming its staff — against the recommendations of the Govenrment Accountability Office. The Veterans Benefits Administration reduced its staff by about 400 employees from 2003 to 2005. Only after 2006 did the agency start hiring a significant number of new adjudicators. “It takes, by the VA’s estimates, two years to get a person really trained,” said Steve Smithson, legislative director at the American Legion. “This is extremely complicated stuff … so they obviously need more employees, and they need to be able to retain those employees as well.” Similar poor planning has led to large backlogs at other agencies. CIS hiked its fees last summer — prices for permanent residency and citizenship doubled — and the agency saw a predictable flood of applications in the months before the increase. But staffing at CIS remained virtually flat. Poor funding Years of tight budgets have also hurt agencies. Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue described his agency as a victim of its own “reputation for competence”: Congress appropriated less than the president’s budget request for 12 of the last 14 years. That has forced the agency to reduce its staff of administrative law judges, who adjudicate claims for disability benefits. The agency is down from 1,200 such judges to almost 1,000, almost as low as during the mid-’90s. “It wasn’t a Republican thing or a Democrat thing. … It was easy to bleed us dry when they were fixing a problem someplace else,” Astrue said. “And our field office structure is under siege. We’ve maintained the same number of field offices, but the population [needing our services] has gone up, and Congress adds a significant new workload every year.” Among the recent new additions to the agency’s workload: processing claims under Medicare’s Part B insurance program and Part D drug plan, and verifying immigrants’ status through Social Security numbers. Critics say Congress has done worse by the Food and Drug Administration. Dozens of laws passed since 1994 have expanded FDA’s regulatory role, but the agency’s budget and staffing hasn’t kept pace to meet those new demands. On the contrary, FDA has lost more than 1,000 employees to tight budgets; after inflation, its appropriations have remained basically flat. “This is not a new problem,” said Marcia Crosse, GAO’s director of health care. “There are resource issues at the FDA. … GAO warned about these issues 10 years ago, and nobody paid attention.” As a result, the agency has fallen behind in almost every area of inspections. It is supposed to inspect foreign medical device manufacturers every two years. But FDA has inspected fewer than 1,500 of roughly 5,000 plants from 2002 to 2007. The worst numbers were in China, where FDA inspected fewer than 10 percent. Appropriations have finally started increasing at VA, after years of neglect. Congress funded the department at $3.7 billion above the president’s request in 2008, and legislators expect that trend to continue in 2009. “We have been fighting this problem piecemeal,” said Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. “As the number of troops sent to the war zone increases, funding for VA must increase in step.” That additional funding should allow VA to hire more than 3,000 adjudicators — but Walcoff warns the full benefits from those new hires could be years away. “I think they [the new hires] will address this increase in receipts, we just have to get them trained,” he said, agreeing with Smithson’s assessment that training takes about two years. High-tech fixes Ask Smithson, the American Legion legislative director, why VA has so many problems processing claims, and he holds up a copy of the department’s application for benefits. “You have to fill this monster out,” Smithson said, flipping through the 16 pages of questions veterans have to answer. Many federal agencies are still running what Astrue called World War II-era systems: lengthy paper applications, filled out by hand and stored in warehouses. At a Senate hearing last month, CIS Director Emilio Gonzalez said his agency still sends files from one office to another via U.S. mail. But agencies are finally starting to modernize. Social Security will unveil a new Web-based benefits application over the next 18 months. The form will take less time to complete, and for most applicants, it will eliminate the need for an in-person visit. That should reduce long wait times at SSA offices around the country. “We’re transitioning from a fully paper-based, nightmare system, to a state-of-the-art electronic system,” Astrue said. “Basically what they did, eight or nine years ago, was take the paper form and put it [online] real quick. But it has questions we don’t need anymore, and asks for information we can find at a later time.” VA is hoping to modernize, too. A congressional hearing earlier this month looked at how VA can use artificial intelligence to identify claims that will likely be approved — and single out the difficult claims for manual review. The technology already exists: Engineers at the IBM Center for the Business of Government have been working with SSA on a similar system for disability claims. Field offices “would print out applications, even though they were filed electronically. And it sat on someone’s desk until they got to it,” said Arnie Greenland, an IBM engineer. “We saw some long waits to find a pretty easy decision.” So IBM worked with SSA to develop the Quick Disability Determination (QDD) process. QDD identifies applications where the claimant likely is disabled, and where it’s easy to find evidence of disability. The system moves those claims out of the regular queue, so they can be quickly examined and approved. Automated systems could also take some of the unpredictability out of claims processing. “You have 57 regional offices, and you could file
the same claim and get 57 different decisions,” Smithson said of VA’s
claims process. “I’ve gotten the question on the record, ‘Can’t you fix this in a year?’ And I go through a moment of despair,” Astrue said. “If you know what’s going on here, you know this can’t be fixed in a year. This took a long time to develop. And it’s harder to fix something than to break it.” -------------------------
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