Posted on 04/08/2013 8:01:44 AM PDT by shove_it
The White House said Friday it is proposing a 13.6 percent increase in funding for the handling of veterans benefits, an effort to reduce the Veterans Affairs Department’s massive backlog of disability claims.
~snip~
The number of pending claims filed by veterans seeking compensation stood this month at 885,000, 70 percent of which have been pending for more than 125 days. Veterans can wait a year or more for a decision at particularly overloaded regional offices, among them Baltimore...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
...one claim per day by one VA worker in severely backlogged CA.
Yer doin’ aheckofajob 0bama.
Yep. They’ll take care of the VA just as soon as they finish fixing the damage from storm Sandy.
Since you are comparing processing centers you can easily come up with a case per workyear for each of them. That gives you the information you need, at first impression, to FIRE MANAGERS.
So, how do you do that ~ which is always a good question ~ but here it's very simple. Just put the lowest producing managers on administrative leave. You can no longer put them on eternal detail and move them from office to office because I won that particular Civil Service decision back in 1978 ~ but you can send them home.
Immediately you get two benefits ~ (1) your low production managers are no longer in the office to gum up the works, and (2) Their replacements, temporary though they might be, are wild eyed and bushy tailed at the chance to get the work done without the permanent boss looking over their shoulder.
Sure, you'll have one less person, but that's like hiring 10 just getting rid of a nonproducing boss. A bad boss in the government is a bad boss in more ways than people in the private sector can imagine.
Since learning to process VA appeals always requires a resort to complex rules you'll want to immediately identify the world's foremost experts in those rules ~ might even be somebody in VA headquarters knows about them ~ not likely since I think they use lawyers to write them ~ but whoever they are and wherever they are they need to be melded into an structure where they can provide assistance to their fellow employees and across organizational lines to other field centers, and even headquarters.
Identify them ~ bring them to a central point for a 2 day conference (less drinking that way) and send them home with some knowledge of who their peers are ~ with names, phone numbers, etc.
Have regular phone/computer conferences about once a week at first and taper off to once a month as the 'backlog' disappears.
It'll take about two years to work it all down.
Oh, yeah, and office files ~ put some folks to work immediately to take all files which contained APPROVED APPEALS and send them to a federal records center. That'll be most of the old paperwork. Free up the cabinets ~ since all this stuff is electronic these days, you really don't need paperwork on old stuff unless there's a chance it's going to RELIVE ~ and denials usually RELIVE more than once, so keep them around.
I retired June 2011 and still don’t have mine done.
Good ideas!
I received a letter from HQMC informing me of the probable cause of my bladder cancer was the contaminated water at Camp LeJeune. My bladder will be removed next week.They suggested I apply for disability, and I contacted the VA. The woman I spoke to hung up on me. Plus, I was told that unless I received 50%, it would come out of my pension.Thank God I kept my Medical when I retired.They sure are looking out for us (S). Semper Fi
Brilliant analysis, muawiyah!
I have nothing but praise for the care I receive at my local VA clinic. But I also have an appeal re: denial of payment, an administrative issue, that will be in appeal for at least two years, I’m told.
We succeeded in whittling it down to nothing in short order by bringing in a new manager who'd listen to us about how to do all these things.
First thing we did was to quit talking about a 'backlog' ~ a couple of weeks with no discussion using that word we were able to figure out what we were doing for a business and focus on fixing the parts.
Then we cleared the inactive files. Too many government offices charged with thousands of administrative due process appeals imagine they must keep everything ~ they don't! We checked our own and no one who'd ever won an appeal from us came back and complained about it.
NO ONE!
That meant all the files related to such an appeal could be sent away to federal gub'mnt outer gehenna ~ the federal records centers!
Gave us room for more chairs, a few more tables ~ to spread out stuff ~ appeals are messy and you may be looking at a dozen pieces of paper and a large rule book simultaneously.
Took us a couple of weeks more to edge out the nonperforming managers ~ we actually found guys in the field offices who thought it was their job to back customers into filing appeals which they could then deny ~ which the customers would forward on to us.
You just never want others at a higher level to think you act that way, but there you had it and we moved those guys aside.
Pitchburg ~ you know it by another name ~ guy retired. They found appeals in his desk crammed in under the drawers going back years.
Somehow I just know the appeals at the field offices in VA are in roughly the same state of affairs today as ours were 20 years ago ~ and for the same reasons. Actually, you could have talked to Julius Caesar, or maybe Sargon of Akkad about this situation and they'd been right up to date.
BTW, you don't do it once ~ it must be repeated. Else the backlog will find reason to recreate itself!
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