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Pension Automation efforts at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are ensuring Veterans and their families receive the benefits they are entitled to, in the most expedient manner possible. With automation, in some cases, the system awards benefits within hours. This automation can also reduce backlogs and eliminate weeks of manual effort.
By incorporating automation into the business logic of the pension claim process, the system delivers feedback to claimants faster, automating the creation of requests for additional claim-supporting evidence and reducing the need for claims representatives to manually create requests. Automation logic also increases the number of claims the digital system can fulfill, reducing the need for manual review while maintaining accurate processing.
The objectives of Pension Automation are to:
- Reduce the average days pending for claims
- Decrease the number of claims pending completion
- Free up human resources from pension claims and align them to other critical areas
- Achieve 75 percent end-to-end claim automation
Recent successes include:
- Within nine hours of claim submission, automation awarded a dependency and indemnity compensation claim submitted by the spouse of a recently deceased Purple Heart Veteran.
- Automation recognized that a Korean War Veteran was rated 100 percent service-connected disabled at the time of his death. The Veteran’s son had filed for a non-service-connected burial. By the time the claim was 10 hours old, automation recognized the Veteran was due more than a non-service-connected burial and instead awarded a service-connected burial.
More than 26,000 claims have been fully automated throughnotification of award decision, which would translate to roughly seven weeks of work if VA staff manually processed the claims. Currently, 63 percent of new burial claims and 10 percent of new dependency and indemnity compensation claims are completed by automation, and since May, Pension Automation has helped reduce pending burial claims by 75 percent.
Ready to join us in improving Veterans’ care? Check out all current OIT career opportunities on DigitalVA. You can also contact VA’s Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer at 512-326-6600, Monday-Friday, 7 a.m.- 5 p.m. CST or by submitting a resume to VACareers@va.gov.
