Mentor Area Veterans Face Long Wait For VA Benefits

Editor's note: This post was created by Patch Editor Chris Mazzolini.

Ohio's veterans are now facing a new enemy at home — long wait times for their disability claims.

The waiting times started increasing in 2010 when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq causing a dramatic uptick in first-time filers, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The data found that in most regional VA offices, not only did waiting times increase, but they vary dramatically with location: about a year and five months in Baltimore, Maryland compared to four months in Fargo, North Dakota. 

The national average now stands at about eleven months, which is dramatically higher than in 2009 when it was four months.

Cleveland's regional office, located on East Ninth Street, has an average wait-time for benefits of 400 days. That's double what it was in April 2011, and four times what it was in October 2010. The backlog has also partly been blamed on the VA still using paper to process their claims. 

In 2011, the Department started implementing a computerized system in several of its regional offices. However, despite spending $537 million on the new program and employing 3,300 claims processors, 97 percent of veterans’ claims are still on paper.

In addition, even though Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki pledged back in March that the VA will end the enormous backlog by 2015, they quietly backed off that promise in an email statement several weeks ago.

U.S. Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, and other Ohio Republicans recently sent a joint letter to Shinseki requesting monthly accountability reports that disclose the progress of the plan to eliminate the backlog.

Read Joyce's blog on Mayfield-Hillcrest Patch for more information about his efforts.

The data above was obtained by The Center for Investigative Reporting from the Department of Veteran’s Affairs and is updated weekly.