I hope, for Veterans sake, that I am wrong about  VASEC’s promise .  Maybe he will keep his promise, but the numbers don’t add up.    The VA’s promise to fix the backlog by 2015 is largely based on  the VA’s “fuzzy math”.  

You see, the VA would have to hire 4000 more employees just to “scan in” the billions of pieces of Veterans C files and data.       Even if the VA did have  the budget to hire 4000 MORE employees (and I doubt that, as it was not budgeted in), hiring and training that many people does not happen overnight!

As an example, the VA promised to hire just 1600 mental health workers, and they said it will take until spring 2013 to hire about a third as many.   If it takes a year to hire 1600 workers, then it would follow that it would take about 3 years to hire 4000, and there is certainly no guarantee that they will even start hiring or training  these 4000 employees tomorrow.

Even if they did quickly hire and train these 4000 new workers, it will obviously take months or years for these new workers  to scan in these billions of documents.

The bottom line is that the VA’s “fuzzy math” does not go in the real world, and we can expect 2015 to come and go without the promised backlog reduction…just like 2010 came and went without the fulfillment of the  promise to “break the backlog this year“.