Organization Plans to Go Paperless to Increase Efficiency of VA Disability Benefits

Baltimore, MDIn an effort to provide better support to the men and women serving in the armed services, Secretary of Veteran Affairs (VA) Eric Shinseki intends to make the entire department paperless in the next two years.

Shinseki hopes that entering all future and pending disability claims into a system database will not only reduce clutter and improve the mobility of the organization, but will also improve efficiency and dispersal of benefits to claimants by reducing the risk of lost paperwork.

Without a system overhaul, the VA predicts that its backlog of claimants will grow to around 2.6 million by 2015, meaning that soldiers injured in the line of duty may wait upwards of five months for their claims to get processed.

Robert Graham, a claims processor in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, recently told the Associated Press that processing a claim can take anywhere between six and 12 hours, and that the new system could reduce that time by 70 percent.

This is the latest in a string of efforts to increase veterans' access to disability claims. Shinseki has already made it easier for soldiers exposed to Agent Orange to receive service-connected compensation and has vowed to take a second look at rejected claims from Gulf War veterans, reports the news provider.