After two weeks of a growing backlog of disability claims older than 125 days, the Veterans Benefits Administration returned to positive territory for the second week in a row last week, chipping away again at clearing its oldest cases.
Just 2,300 of the oldest claims were cleared last week, leaving 382,000 to go and keeping the agency to the backlog level of late October. Two weeks of backsliding happened in late November as well as late December that ended a streak of progress that began in mid-summer 2013. During that streak, about 6,000 of the oldest cases were being cleared in the average week. Since then, an average of 1,650 a week have been, based on data released in the VBA’s weekly “Monday Morning Work Workload Reports.”
Despite recent backsliding, there was overall substantial improvement in the past year, with about 23% fewer claims pending overall and more than a third fewer waiting over 125 days. The percentage taking over 125 days had been cut by 11 percentage points.
Weekly progress since mid-summer
Below is our weekly snapshot of claims status and two graphics from the Veterans Benefits Administration’s weekly “Monday Morning Workload Reports” that track claims processing progress.
| CLAIMS PENDING | OVER 125 DAYS | % OVER 125 DAYS | AVG. DAYS PENDING | |
| This week | 633,967 | 381,894 | 60.20% | 174.5 |
| Last week | 636,371 | 384,213 | 60.40% | 175.3 |
| Change | -2,404 | -2,319 | -0.20% | -0.8 |
| Year ago | 823,561 | 583,739 | 70.90% | N/A |