Va Claims Overflow

[carlie]

VA claims files overflowing.tiff

"Stacks of Veterans Affairs claim folders overtake a regional office in Winston-Salem, N.C. These photos were included in a 2012 report from the Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General.

While researching our story on the Veterans Affairs benefits backlog, we sawthis Veterans Affairs Administration Inspector General's reportthat points out that at one VA center, a regional office in Winston-Salem, N.C., had so much paper that it "created an unsafe workspace for (VA) employees and appeared to have the potential to compromise the integrity of the building."

The IG report, from August, 2012, found that at this one office alone, "37,000 claims folders were stored on top of file cabinets." The report says that this "creates an unsafe environment for the employees, overexposes many claims folders to risk of fire/water damage, inadvertent loss and possible misplacement, as well as impedes (Veterans Affairs Regional Office) productivity by reducing access to many folders in a timely manner."

According to the report, the sheer weight of the combined folders actually exceeded the load-bearing capacity of the building itself.

As claims continue to pour in, almost one million veterans are currently waiting for their benefit claims to be processed, according to aninvestigation conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The CIR's report also showed that the average wait time for a disability claim to be resolved is 279 days. First time claims take longer, averaging 318 days, and the wait time has grown 2,000 percent in the past four years.

The managers at the Winston-Salem office told the inspectors that they asked the VA's regional headquarters for extra space, but "never received a formal written response to that request."

This might be evidence of the fact that since 2009, the VA has processed a record number of claims, more than four million since 2009, according to a VA spokesman in Washington."

Full article:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/04/veterans-affairs-backlog-files-were-stacked-so-high-they-posed-a-safety-risk-to-va-staff-1.html

[Pete53]

I think that this is more like the real VA than an exception.