Delay and deny, cont.
I had another article Sunday on the delay many veterans experience in getting a response to their claims for disability benefits. Fortunately, with this one I was able to get a clearer picture of why these delays are occurring. Lots of factors contribute, and it's hard to say which ones are the biggest problems, but clearly the Veterans Benefits Administration needs more people, more productivity or both.
Given complaints by the Government Accountability Office (Congress's nonpartisan investigative arm) that the Department of Veterans Affairs hasn't sought any kind of budget increase to handle the increase in claims and that the department has claimed that productivity increases will help ease the backlog without explaining exactly how those productivity increases were going to be achieved, I think it's fair to say that this is a management problem.
Next up: Some oddnesses so odd that the GAO designated them a "crisis" -- almost four years ago.
