125 days to adjudicate a claim is the lofty goal vA seeks to attain by 2014, 2015 and beyond according to Undersecretary for veterans Benefits  Allison A. Hickey. What, then, are we to make of Oakland, California’s Regional Office which prides itself on being able to even look at your claim initiallywithin this critically sought time span? Yes indeed. OAKRO‘s diligent workerbees are hard at it down on Clay Street 8 hours every day rain or shine. May be its  time for some of that overtime  technique private businesses employ to overcome this problem? That would blow a hole in the budget for all the bonus pay already promised  just for working the standard 8 hour shift already. Put yourself in their shoes. Why, could you even imagine putting in another 2 hours a day for those no account, welfare-prone individuals who selflessly volunteered to defend America? Maybe if they give me a pay raise. I donnnn’t think so. ROFLMAO, cowboy. WTF? We’re already 269 days out on claims. What’s one more? I’m taking a break down to Starbucks, dude. Back in 20 minutes. If the phone rings, let it go on my voicemail. If Fred asks, tell him I went down to the mail room or something.

And the 60% error rate continues. I wonder if it’s higher at OAKRO? vA isn’t suffering a backlog. It’s called “an unforeseen temporal claims timeline disparity”. Or “a predictable consequence of the new Vets who are filing as many as  11 to 14 claims upon discharge”. Or “a plethora of highly questionable mental disorder claims for PTSD”. Or need I go on? “The glut of Agent Orange claims Congress heaped on us suddenly”. “A confluence of circumstances never before encountered at the vA that took us completely unawares”.

125 days? I filed on 30 March 1994 for 2 claims and an increase on another. 221 days later (still in 1994) on 7 November, I received all three denials. They had a C-file on me from 1989 so they didn’t have to process a new 21-526. The last time vA saw a 125 day claim sail through was 1960. Why are they acting like this is some admirable goal ?  Three months and five days to an inevitable denial 86% of the time on a new claim? Not to mention the error rate that compromises 60+% of the ones they do manage to accomplish? State Farm would be ashamed if the best they could do was 125 days to some kind of resolution-half of which were in error.

For the record, I question the 269 day backlog. I refiled five years ago in February 2007 for the same three benefits as 1994. Four hundred ninety three days later they finished two of them. The third? Five hundred eighty five days. The article says vA’s current “target time” is presently180 days  (assuming they calculated using the planet Mars’ day).

It all depends on what the meaning of “day” is. If it takes 125 days to look at it and you subtract that from the 269 days to get it wrong, then technically it only took 144 days which is 36 fewer than the national norm currently. This is how we got into this fix.