Hi Jim,

My sister e-mailed you on our behalf and forwarded your response to us.

My husband has been dealing with the PA VA for 19 months. His last C & P was over 2 weeks ago. Everytime we check his e-benefits it says they are compiling information for the Review Board.

His compensation is desperately needed as our house has went into forclosure and Wells Fargo is unwilling to work with us until he recieves his compensation.

Any help that you can provide to speed up his recieving his compensation would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know what you need.

Reply:

I get messages like yours every day.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (The VA) does not expedite claims for the financial need of any veteran. If they did, every veteran would say that they were in acute financial distress.

The fact is that VA doesn't expedite claims at all. VA recieves thousands and thousands of claims each day at the 57 regional offices that adjudicate claims. Each claim is time and date stamped, reviewed to determine what the claim is about and then placed in line to be processed.

They are currently looking at about one million claims in the line. The majority of those claims will take 2 years to complete. Most of those claims will be denied and the denied claim will have to be appealed. An appeal will add another 2 to 3 years to the length of time it takes to get the claim done right by VA.

I have 2 pages on my blog that addresses the enormous backlog of claims and also how to track where a particular claim is in the process.

Please click;

https://www.vawatchdog.org/the-va-claims-backlog.html

and

https://www.vawatchdog.org/how-to-track-your-claim.html

I advise veterans to ignore the eBenefits site. It is almost always wrong. The VA is not able to track a claim with any degree of accuracy. That is explained in detail on my blog

I advise veterans that they must plan their financial lives as if they will never receive any VA benefits. I do that because they may never receive any VA benefits. If a veteran is waiting for a windfall from VA in hopes of getting a claim approved, that is much the same as buying lottery tickets in hopes of a winning ticket.

In your case, there is a 70% likelihood that his claim will be denied. I don't know what his claim is or but even if he has the best claim ever presented, the odds are that it will be denied and he will have to appeal.

If he had a C & P exam 2 weeks ago, in my experience it is likely that there will be another year before anybody at the regional office will even look at his claim.

It isn't that nobody cares at VA. The situation of mismanagement and problems inside VA has grown over the years to a point today where the VA barely functions at all. Every VA employee wants to help every veteran and they all want to do a good job. But the organization itself is broken and dysfunctional.

You must begin planning your future as if you will never receive any money from VA. Then, a year or two or even more from now, if you do receive compensation benefits, you'll be able to start setting up your life for the better.