The Department of Veterans Affairs continues to report significant progress in reducing the number of outstanding claims. Secretary Shinseki’s stated goals continue to be elimination of the claims backlog, processing new claims within 125 days, and 98% accuracy by 2015. Shinseki confirmed these goals in his address to the 2013 National Convention of the American Legion.However – how very, very, however: The VA has applied “whack-a-mole management”, striking the highly visible and politically sensitive claims backlog while intentionally neglecting other critical functions which are now raising their ugly mole heads. I recently talked by telephone with a friend who works within the Indianapolis VA Regional Office. She checked on a veteran’s appeal which was filed early in 2012. It’s still in the untouched stack and will remain there for the foreseeable future. As the veteran said, with all seriousness and no longer rhetorically, “I may die before I hear anything on my appeal.” In this veteran’s case, winning the appeal will ultimately, someday, over the rainbow, mean an increase in his compensation of over a thousand dollars per month. This veteran has not been able to work since 2005 due to his several severe service connected disabilities. He is in financial hardship. No doubt many veterans who have had appeals pending for years have died during this period of intentional neglect. In a macabre trickledown effect, these first delays cause secondary delays in processing surviving spouses’ claims for death benefits. There are two reasons for the extended delay in the Indy Appeals Team even looking at the veteran’s appeal. First, the VA Central Office under Shinseki has mandated that all VA regional office employees qualified to work initial claims will do so and neglect any other duties. The Appeals Team’s “any other duties” are appeals. Second, my VA friend was speaking to me on her first day back from the government shut down. The flow of thousands of incoming new claims did not stop during the furlough. Much of the VA’s narrowly focused progress in reducing the backlog was lost because of Congressional political childishness, which – trickledown again – means more months before our example veteran’s appeal is even opened. Imagine the VA employees desperately bailing out a leaking boat. About a year ago the rate of bailing (claims completed per month) finally exceeded the rate of leaking (incoming claims). The water in the boat (backlog of new, unprocessed claims) actually started to slowly decline. The Congressmen who used shutting down government as a political ploy stopped the VA employees from bailing for 16 days. But the VA boat continued to leak and the water level went back up. Sticking with the VA boat analogy: while the employees continue to face inboard and bail as hard as they can there are torpedoes getting closer and nobody seems to care – and these threats are of the VA’s own making: adjudication errors and associated appeals. VA spokesmen report, evidently believing what the regional offices tell them, adjudication accuracy rates progressively increasing to over 90%. But the American Legion stated before Congress in September that these VA data are “inconsistent with our Regional Office Action Review visits nationwide, where errors are found routinely in over half of the cases reviewed.” Claimants who meekly accept erroneous, “get this case off my desk now” VA denials will remain cheated, and their cases are unlikely to ever show up as errors in the VA data. Claimants who file appeals before the Board of Veterans Appeals are winning over 70% of their cases. What does that tell us about the initial processing accuracy? Processing an appeal is time consuming and expensive for the VA, but this additional effort occurs later in the timeline of the claim. The VA remains primarily concerned about the near term: “What will please Congress now?” They remain oblivious to processing errors which result in disservice to veterans and ultimately increase overall employee work time due to appeals. They point to increased training and streamlined methods, but the bottom line is that the VA does not include accuracy in employee performance appraisals. As Patton told his officers, “Soldiers will do what you review, and not do what you don’t.” The VA reviews how many cases the employees crank out, regardless of the quality. If the water in the boat (backlog of new cases) was the only threat to the vessel, that might make a heartless kind of sense. The VA will stay afloat (look good to Congress). But the twin torpedoes will assuredly strike soon (poor accuracy and appeals) – nay, they have hit already – and are the greater long term threats. Only now is the VA grudgingly considering adding an accuracy metric to employee performance appraisals. Why has not the VA previously reviewed employee adjudication accuracy? Every other federal employee performance appraisal system I have ever known has included quality metrics. During my short time as a human resources contractor I helped teach a two day course in establishing performance standards. Two days. With breaks every hour and for lunch. We might conjecture that the unpleasant parts of reviewing quality performance standards, communicating bad news to the employees and helping a marginal employees do better, are somehow frightening to VA supervisors. ‘Easier to avoid unpleasantness by faking accuracy data and reporting that to Central Office. Somehow the real customers have been forgotten. Who are the real customers? Oh, yeah! Veterans! I knew that!