Swords to Plowshares

Army Times: Troops risk ruin while awaiting benefit checks

His lifelong dream of becoming a soldier had, in the end, come to this for Isaac Stevens: 28, penniless, in a wheelchair, fending off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.

The injury [sustained in boot camp] alone didn’t put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy — specifically, the way injured service members are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow.

As is often the case with disabled veterans, the public has to step in to fix the wrongs committed against those who selflessly serve.

Stevens was moved to the Operation Homefront apartment after a social worker at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, acting on her own initiative, rescued Stevens from a homeless shelter there.

“This is a situation where someone used their common sense and they did the right thing, versus saying, ‘This is the rules. We can’t do this,’” Tripler spokeswoman Minerva Anderson said of the social worker.

In another instance:

Simon Heine served three tours in Iraq as a tank mechanic before he was discharged with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

His wife quit college so she could figure out how her four children could live on less than $1,000 a month. Eventually, she moved the family of six into an Operation Homefront apartment so they could finish navigating the bureaucracy and wait out the arrival of Social Security and VA benefits.

“It is like giving you a car and taking the steering wheel off. They say, ‘There is the gas and the brake. Just go straight,’ and hopefully, you are going in the right direction,” Heine said.

And why does it take so long?

“The claims are a lot more complicated than people think,” said Ursula Henderson, director of the VA’s regional office in Houston.

Stating that these claims are “complicated” begs the question, are the claim processors being properly trained to handle these newer and more “complicated” claims?

A May 2008 GAO report found:

VBA has a standard training curriculum for new claims processors and an 80-hour annual training requirement for all claims processors, but staff are not held accountable for meeting this requirement.

Although VBA has a training requirement for VSRs and RVSRs, it does not have a policy outlining consequences for individual staff who do not complete their required training. Further, VBA does not maintain data on the training completed by individuals

In fact, claims processors we interviewed raised some issues with the training they received.