March 6, 2005
BY CHRIS ADAMS and ALISON YOUNG
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF
DRY RIDGE, Ky. -- Like thousands of American war veterans, Alfred Brown died waiting.
When he was a 19-year-old soldier fighting in Italy in 1945, shrapnel from an enemy shell ripped into his abdomen. His wounds were so severe that he twice received last rites.
After Brown returned home to Kentucky, the government that had promised to care for its wounded veterans instead shorted him. He found in 1981 that his monthly disability check didn't cover all his injuries. He began what would become a 21-year battle for compensation.
"As a member of the so-called 'Greatest Generation,' I am well aware of the large numbers of us passing away," he wrote to the nation's chief veterans judge in 2001. "I am prepared to meet our Creator. My fear is that your court will not make a decision in my case."
Brown was right. He died a year later, and his case died with him. While closing the books on the case, Judge Kenneth Kramer noted that Brown might have been right. Had he not died, the judge wrote, the court likely would have ruled in Brown's favor.
Tens of thousands of other veterans have returned from war only to find that they have to fight their government to win disability payments owed to them. A Free Press Washington bureau investigation has found that injured soldiers who petition the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for those payments are often doomed by lengthy delays, hurt by inconsistent rulings, and failed by veterans representatives who try to help them.
For America's veterans, plus the thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the veterans affairs system has three points where cases often go wrong: the selection of a special representative called a veterans service officer, the review by a regional VA office, and the filing of an appeal. The investigation also found that:
•Many VA-accredited service officers who help veterans file cases receive minimal training and are rarely tested to ensure competence. The service officers work for nonprofit organizations such as the American Legion, as well as states and counties. Their skill level often determines whether a claim succeeds.
•The VA's network of 57 regional offices produces vastly inconsistent results, meaning veterans in one region receive different treatment and more generous disability checks from veterans in another.
•Veterans face lengthy delays if they appeal the VA's decisions. The average wait is nearly three years, and many veterans wait 10 years for a final ruling. In the past decade, several thousand veterans died before their cases were resolved, according to an analysis of VA data.
In interviews late last year, the VA secretary at the time, Anthony Principi, and other VA officials acknowledged many of the agency's shortcomings but said it has improved since the Bush administration took over.
"This agency was under water in 2001," Principi said. "My people have made tremendous progress."
The current secretary, R. James Nicholson, who was sworn in recently, had no comment.
For Alfred Brown's family, frustration remains over his case. Brown could have collected nearly 45 years of back pay, his attorney said. Based on VA rates, the pay would have been worth about $30,000.
"It wasn't so much the money," said his son, Clayton Brown, on a day when he visited his father's grave north of Lexington, Ky. "He felt he was robbed. He almost gave his life up, and this is what he was getting in return?"
No simple job
VA workers are reminded daily of the pledge by Abraham Lincoln "to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan ..."
But the job isn't simple.
The VA makes disability payments for injuries as obvious as an amputated leg and as complex as post-traumatic stress disorder. The cases include combat wounds and peacetime injuries, because veterans are serving their country whether they're in a Humvee in Iraq or in boot camp. Veterans receive ratings from zero to 100, depending on their disabilities. Payments for a single veteran range from $108 to $2,299 a month and are supposed to reflect the vet's lost earnings potential.
But the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, has found that disability payments are based on 60-year-old labor market assumptions. So veterans who have desk jobs in today's service and information economy can draw checks based on the fact their disabilities would keep them from good manufacturing jobs.
The system stems from a time when duty-related mental illnesses were not acknowledged, and before medical advances allowed for treatment of wounds that were fatal in earlier wars.
Beyond that are tough fiscal realities. The Congressional Budget Office has indicated that the VA could save significantly if it eliminated new payments for certain diseases not connected to military service. Most payments can be linked to service, but veterans also can qualify if they're diagnosed soon after completing their military service.
Rules and deadlines
Applying for disability benefits requires veterans to navigate a labyrinth of bureaucratic rules and strict deadlines. It can require the skill of an investigator and the mind of a physician.
That's why national veterans groups have for decades provided free help. About 40 veterans service organizations, such as the American Legion and Disabled American Veterans, are authorized to assist with VA claims, as are many states.
But the network of VA-accredited service officers is a patchwork of well-meaning helpers whose training and expertise vary widely.
Contrary to its own regulations, the VA does little to ensure that veterans receive competent representation from service organizations, records show. Yet the agency prohibits vets from hiring lawyers until after their claims have been denied -- and after they're generally well into the appeals process.
Two-thirds of veterans who submit claims use service officers, and picking the right one can determine whether they get full payment, a fraction or nothing.
"The best advocates can be very good, and lousy ones can be awful," said Ron Abrams, joint executive director of the National Veterans Legal Services Program, which trains service officers for the American Legion and other veterans groups.
New evidence from the state of Washington illustrates the odds veterans face in this service officer roulette.
Since July 2003, the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs has tracked the outcome of every claim filed by veterans groups that receive state funding. The groups' success rates range from 53 percent to 81 percent. Among the busiest individual service officers, those handling 30 or more completed claims, the success rates can range from 35 percent to 98 percent, the state's data show.
The VA's accreditation program is supposed to ensure that all service officers are responsible and qualified. About 11,000 service officers are on the VA's roster; about 80 percent are accredited through nonprofits.
Checks and balances
VA regulatory files show that the agency, for decades, has done little to determine the adequacy of service officer training provided by veterans groups or to check the quality of the claims prepared by their officers.
Only rarely does the VA suspend or revoke a service officer's accreditation. When it does happen, it's generally the result of criminal charges rather than incompetence.
"What we do is take it on the word of the service organization that the individual has had sufficient training," said Martin Sendek, a representative of the general counsel's office at the VA.
That training, however, varies widely, according to a Free Press Washington bureau survey of 13 large veterans groups and 33 state veterans departments. At one end of the spectrum is Disabled American Veterans, which has full-time paid national service officers and a 16-month training and testing program.
Groups such as American Ex-Prisoners of War and Catholic War Veterans rely largely on part-time volunteers who aren't required to complete any courses or pass any tests.
"We don't get paid, so we're not going to be that strict with these people," said Doris Jenks, the national training director for American Ex-Prisoners of War.
Nonprofits generally have less stringent requirements for service officers than those working for state veterans agencies reviewed for this series.
Only 38 percent of the nonprofits required a test before recommending that the VA accredit a representative. That compared with 67 percent of state veterans departments.
Once accredited, few service officers are ever tested for competence. Twenty-seven percent of the states require later testing. Only one nonprofit, the Disabled American Veterans, had that requirement.
Retired Vice Adm. Daniel Cooper, the VA's undersecretary for benefits, said the VA fixes any mistakes that service officers might make. If anything needs to be done to make an application complete, Cooper said, "we do it."
Tim McClain, the VA's general counsel, noted that veterans have extensive appeal rights.
"There are a lot of checks and balances in the system," he said.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, however, has repeatedly ruled that veterans are out of luck when they've been steered wrong by VA-accredited service officers.
Nightmares and flashbacks
That was the case with Gerry Corwin.
As a navigator aboard a B24 bomber during World War II, Corwin survived more than 30 missions over Japanese-controlled waters. He came home to Minneapolis with two Air Medals -- and disabling nightmares and flashbacks.
There were images of his buddies burning in planes crashed on runways and of a friend killed on a mission that Corwin persuaded him to take. By December 1984, those nightmares began to overtake Corwin.
Corwin applied for disability benefits and was denied, in part because the VA couldn't find many of his military records, which had burned in a 1973 fire at a national archive in St. Louis.
So Corwin went to the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs and enlisted the help of Kirk Jones, a service officer who'd become VA-accredited a year earlier through his state and the American Legion.
Jones submitted a three-sentence letter to the VA on Corwin's behalf and didn't take any steps to prove Corwin's claim. He didn't, for example, push for a psychiatric examination from the VA. He didn't round up statements from Corwin's crew to corroborate that they'd been sent home in May 1945 for "combat fatigue."
"I should have suggested a VA examination," said Jones, who no longer is a service officer. He said he'd had minimal training when he first handled Corwin's claim.
That 1984 claim went nowhere.
In 1995, Jones, who by then had gained extensive experience plus classroom training, restarted Corwin's claim. He did what he hadn't done a decade earlier, and more.
This time, Jones helped Corwin win compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder and a heart problem. Jones filed several appeals, and each time the VA granted more benefits, declaring Corwin totally disabled in 1998.
Even so, the veterans court ruled last summer that Corwin can't collect back pay from 1984 to 1995 because the proper documents weren't filed in 1986 to keep his original claim alive.
The losses amount to tens of thousands of dollars, he and his lawyer estimate. Corwin, 82, said the money means a lot to him and his wife. They live in a house owned by her family in rural Mississippi.
"It would mean a home," he said. "Let's start with that."
"To have to come back and to fight 20 years to get what you're supposed to be given," he said, "and to fight your own government for it, is disappointing."
Error rate
Nationwide, errors are made in 13 percent of claims, more than three times the agency's hoped-for rate of 4 percent, according to a VA quality-control database that reviews a sample of the decisions. That translates to 103,000 errors a year; in many cases they can result in either an overpayment or an underpayment of benefits.
"I don't think anybody is proud of the fact that we have" a 13-percent error rate, said Michael Walcoff, who oversees the agency's regional offices. Errors often trigger appeals, sending thousands of veterans into an ongoing cycle of mistakes, appeals and rehearings.
In some regional offices, the error rate last year was far worse -- as high as 23 percent in Wilmington, Del. The low was 3 percent, in Des Moines, Iowa. The Detroit regional office was 12 percent.
The VA appeals system can be a minefield.
With the average disability payment now $7,860 a year, awards for back benefits can be substantial because an award is calculated as though the VA made the right decision when the claim was first filed. Some veterans with severe disabilities win $100,000 or more.
But if a veteran dies during an appeal, the case dies, too. In the past decade, more than 13,700 veterans died while their cases were in some stage of appeal, records show. The VA said experience suggests a few thousand of them wouldn't have actively pursued their appeals.
Even if a veteran wins a case but dies before receiving payment, his family is often out of luck. Unless the veteran had an eligible spouse or dependent child, the money stays in the U.S. Treasury.
Principi, the former VA secretary, said in an October interview he was stung when he learned a few years ago how common it is for veterans to die with their cases in limbo. Although some deaths are inevitable, "it's not acceptable," he said. "We need to do something about it."
A Vietnam veteran
Berlie Bowman was one of the victims of red tape and delays.
Bowman had gone to Vietnam in 1967, an outgoing kid following in his father's military footsteps. "When he was drafted, he went without a fuss," said his sister Paulette. "He was a different person when he came back."
He was skittish, quick to anger, uneasy in crowds. The family trod warily around him. Over three decades, he ran through 30 jobs; he lived in a small trailer on a curvy North Carolina road.
His first disability claim, for "nerves" in 1971, was denied. His second try, in 1995, met a similar fate. But that time, Bowman pushed back.
Working with an attorney, he assembled evidence to show that he had post-traumatic stress disorder and to document that it had started in Vietnam. The case wound through the system, receiving six rulings, until Bowman fell ill with pancreatic cancer.
On June 16, 2004, the Board of Veterans' Appeals finally agreed with Bowman's claim. It declared that "credible supporting evidence" showed that Bowman suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his time in Vietnam, just as Bowman had contended for nine years.
Bowman's attorney immediately pestered the VA for Bowman's back benefits, dating to 1995. By then, Bowman's cancer treatment had been stopped.
On June 21, attorney Dan Krasnegor or his assistant talked with the VA every two hours. On June 22, they were told that the official disability rating was complete and that only final signatures were needed for Bowman's check for $53,784 to be cut. "Oh, it's in the computer system," they were told.
Berlie Bowman died that night, and his claim died with him. No check was sent.
At Bowman's burial, his mother accepted a sharply folded American flag from the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Seventeen former soldiers stood in formation in the rain. A bugler played taps as riflemen splintered the silence with a three-gun salute.
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GAO Report on the VA Claims Process
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