Veterans' Benefits

Under the direction of the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), 58 regional offices of the Department of Veterans Affairs receive and process veterans' compensation and pension disability claims. Responding to a GAO survey, 55 regional offices reported 238 practices that they believe have improved the accuracy of their disability decisions and remand rates. GAO grouped these into four areas: (1) efforts to improve staff training, guidance, or accountability; (2) changes in the supervisory or staffing structure; (3) efforts to develop evidence accurately and fully; and (4) efforts to communicate more effectively with veterans. VBA has taken some steps to identify potentially promising practices but has neither followed up on this effort nor developed a system for evaluating such practices and disseminating the results to regional offices. Regional offices reported various practices that they believe have helped improve their claims-processing performance, but regional office and VBA officials agreed that it would be helpful if VBA evaluated and identified best practices so that regional offices could use their limited resources to try only the most promising ones. VBA is in the initial stages of planning a system for evaluating promising practices but has not established specific time periods for developing and implementing it.

GAO noted that: (1) the 55 regional offices responding to GAO's survey reported a total of 238 practices that they believe have helped improve the accuracy of their disability decisions and remand rates; (2) GAO grouped these practices into four broad areas of focus: (a) efforts to improve staff training, guidance, or accountability; (b) changes in supervisory or staffing structure; (c) efforts to develop evidence accurately and fully; and (d) efforts to communicate more effectively with veterans; (3) while many practices were similar, the mix and number of practices varied from office to office, and the regional offices viewed some practices as more effective than others in improving accuracy and remand rates; (4) however, the regional offices generally had not conducted evaluations to demonstrate a link between a specific practice and improvements in accuracy or remand rates; (5) similarly, VBA has not systematically evaluated regional office practices to identify best practices that hold the most promise for improving the claims-processing performance of regional offices across the nation; (6) in a 1995 report, GAO emphasized that VBA needed to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of regional offices' claims-processing practices to identify those that hold promise for improving the performance of regional offices nationwide; (7) VBA took steps in 1997 to identify potentially promising practices, however, it has neither followed up on this effort nor developed a system for evaluating promising practices and disseminating the results to regional offices; (8) regional office and VBA officials stated it would be beneficial if VBA evaluated and identified best practices so that regional offices could use their limited resources to try only the most promising practices; and (9) VBA officials told GAO they are planning to develop a system for evaluating promising practices but, to date, evaluation efforts have been limited to a few initiatives related to VBA's efforts to reengineer its business processes for adjudicating disability claims.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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