VA Disability Claim Backlogs Mirror SSA Backlogs

It is not just the Social Security Administration that has enormous backlogs of disability claims. Here is an excerpt from a CBS Evening News report:

Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have already filed 176,000 new disability claims, but have run into a VA backlog of more than 400,000 cases. VA officials say reducing this backlog is their top priority.

"I am not happy with it. I want it to be shorter," says [VA] Secretary Jim Nicholson.

Nicholson says the hurdle is that every claim has to be verified when none of the records are on computers. "They're all paper and some are (very) thick. We are working this; it's a big deal for us. It's a high priority," Nicholson says. [Note that VA is saying that a transition to paperless files is the key, which is exactly what the Commissioner of Social Security has been saying, although there is no evidence to date that the conversion to scanned files is doing anything to reduce the backlog at Social Security.]

But Nicholson insists the VA is not understaffed, an assertion veterans groups call absurd. Lewis sees a mistake-prone agency in need of a wartime upgrade.