VA Benefits Management Systems Need Increased Management

Although the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has made great strides recently by implementing its Veterans Benefits Management Systems (VBMS) across all of the organization’s regional offices, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) still reports that the VBMS is not processing veteran benefits requests with the greatest efficiency.

The recent GAO report states that various components of the VBMS that should already be developed are not developed, greatly hindering veterans who are entitled to benefits through the VBA. For example, the process by which veterans request their benefits has not yet been automated, despite the fact that 95 percent of veteran files are stored electronically. The system also lacks development plans for pension processing within the system, and plans for support appeals processing.

Despite receiving approximately $1 billion in funding between 2009 and 2015, GAO says the VBMS is lagging. In fact, GAO reports that VBMS does not have a fully-projected plan for when the systems will be completed and ready for implementation. This causes managerial issues because the VBA cannot adequately hold its employees accountable for administering VBMS and executing veteran benefits expansion.

GAO also identified three additional areas where increased management might be of benefit, including cost estimation. Currently, VBA does not have an accurate estimate for how much system improvements could cost. One potential effect of this could be insufficient funds when completing the project.

The second of those three areas for improvement is system availability. GAO reports that VBA has not implemented adequate system response goals, keeping users from having an estimate for how long their requests may take, thus hindering user satisfaction. Additionally, this keeps managers from knowing how well systems are working because there would be no benchmark against which managers may compare performances.

Last, GAO suggested increased management with regard to system defects. A recently deployed system update included a variety of unresolved system defects, hindering user experience and user ability to make benefits requests.

All these issues greatly hinder user satisfaction, and, according to GAO, VBA needs to do more to test for that. The report states that VBA has not identified adequate goals to measure patient satisfaction, and therefore has no plan to improve it.

To gauge user satisfaction, GAO administered its own survey of patients, finding that a majority of them were indeed satisfied with their VBMS experiences. However, there was one population identified which did not report satisfaction with VBMS. This population included those who examine claims decisions. However, GAO states that this information may not be completely useful to VBA because the agency does not have any goals against which it can measure this data.

To counter these issues, GAO provided the VBA with five suggestions to improve VBMS. The first of those included updating development plans to include a schedule and estimated costs of development. The second states that the VBA create response time goals to aid systems improvements. The third entails decreasing unresolved systems defects. The fourth includes developing a survey to measure user satisfaction. The last states VBA establish goals to measure user satisfaction against in order to foster improvements.