Law Daniel Ho is lead author of a study showing no improvement in veterans’ claim resolutions. (Image credit: Rod Searcey)
Stanford researchers examining the veterans' appeals process find that legal errors and due process mistakes while processing claims are much higher than publicly reported. A new study by Stanford scholars and their colleagues shines a stark spotlight on governance issues that have plagued a cornerstone of the nation's administrative system for years: rampant errors and a backlog of appeals cases involving veterans' benefits. The volume of veterans' appeals - of which the vast majority are related to disability compensation claims - is huge. Some 90 judges in the Board of Veterans' Appeals (BVA) historically decided about 50,000 cases per year, with an inventory of over 425,000 cases pending. It takes an average of seven years for a veteran's disputed claim to get resolved. In fact, the Inspector General's Office at the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that in one quarter of 2016, 7 percent of cases were deemed "resolved" at the Veterans Benefits Administration because the veterans had died while waiting. Part of the problem, the study suggests, stems from a mismanaged trade-off between quantity and quality.
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