Despite years of a commitment to streamline and shorten the claims process, the Department of Veterans Affairs still sits on applications for egregious amounts of time. While improvements have been achieved, the 125-day wait at the St. Petersburg office is a disservice to Florida’s military men and women who earned the nation’s gratitude but await the promises that service to country commands.
Out of the 56 regional VA offices across the nation, St. Petersburg ranks first in the number of pending disability claims older than 125 days. Sixty-one percent of the 28,000 claims in this state fall into that category. Nationally, that figure stands at 48 percent.
Congressman Vern Buchanan, R-Sarasota, and Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter, took great exception to the “unacceptably long” wait times at the St. Petersburg office in a letter to Veterans Affairs last week. With more than 66,000 veterans in Buchanan’s Southwest Florida district, including Manatee County, the congressmen told the Herald Washington Bureau that “… I think it’s outrageous people have to wait 125 days to have their claim decided.”
Indeed, the St. Petersburg VA office is a national disgrace, one struggling with an obsolescent records system still mired in paper. Files sit in loose boxes or dumped on the end caps of shelves because the agency cannot procure more shelves. No private enterprise could survive such a shoddy system of record keeping.
Bradenton’s Anthony Hardie, the national director of the Washington-based Veterans for Common Sense, told the Herald that “Veterans who are waiting on their claims to be approved should not have to suffer through the incompetence of the St. Pete regional office.”
Admittedly, the VA is improving services but the agency continues to be handicapped by a shortage of personnel and resources. In fiscal 2012, the average disability compensation or pension claim soared to 262 days — an astounding rise4 from 188 days the prior year. Back then, the St. Petersburg office held almost 47,000 backlogged disability claims, second to only Waco, Texas.
The VA’s long-term goal in processing time is an average of 90 days. The St. Petersburg office is more than a month away from that, according to the latest figures from the inspector general.
The director of the St. Petersburg office, Kerrie Witty, told the Herald progress is happening, a statement supported by a veterans advocate.
But Buchanan, Murphy and the public must keep up the pressure, else the VA slide back into bureaucratic quicksand. We want concrete proof that the delay time is on a steady decline and beats the goal.
