Jeff Bingaman: “Let me read a portion of the article which I think tells a lot of the story. In the past, VA officials could deal with…”

“Let me read a portion of the article which I think tells a lot of the story. In the past, VA officials could deal with demands that the agency improve by redefining its work. Thompson recalled with a laugh that his first VA boss told him it used to take his office six months to process new claims. "Now we have cut that to 180 days," the official said. Although that is semihumorous, I do think that kind of an evasion of the problem has characterized the VA for too many years. The article pointed out that the Department of Veterans Affairs made significant progress in reducing the time it took to process veterans' claims between the years 1994 and 1997, but since then, the processing time has increased from 133 days on average to the current rate of about 160 days. The administration has called for steps to reduce that, to get it down to an average response time of 92 days, but I am concerned that the erosion of veterans' benefits, the difficulty that our veterans have in seeing those benefits delivered, will weigh against recruitment and retention of the quality personnel that we need in our Armed Forces today.”