Righting a big wrong

Monday, July 21, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

The value of congressional oversight was proved last week when the Pentagon’s accounting department agreed to double-check benefit claims from more than 25,000 veterans.

Many of those claims may have been rejected more as the result of bureaucratic disarray than because of any disqualifying factors.

Five years ago Congress reversed a long-standing rule that required any disability pay that had been received by veterans to be deducted from their pensions upon retirement.

Veterans were then allowed to file claims for that portion of their pensions that had been lost because of the disability deductions. Tens of thousands of veterans subsequently filed.

The job of processing the claims fell to the Pentagon’s Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which outsourced the work to Cleveland-based Lockheed Martin Business Process Solutions.

Complications quickly arose. Cross-referencing the veterans’ claims with information on file at the Veterans Affairs Department proved laborious. A backlog of more than 200,000 cases was cleared only last month.

But in clearing the backlog, Pentagon and Lockheed Martin clerks had to work “feverishly,” according to an Associated Press report. Standards were lowered, the Associated Press reported, and eventually quality control procedures were outright suspended to speed the process.

Word of the feverish pace, and its potential for unjustly denying veterans the benefits they had earned, reached a House subcommittee headed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. His staff, after examining stacks of records, concluded that the claims of more than 25,000 veterans were rejected after quality assurance procedures had been stopped.

As a result, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service agreed to double-check those rejected claims. The service also agreed to audit the claims of veterans who were approved for payments, to ensure that they hadn’t been slighted.

Owing to the work of the subcommittee, the veterans’ claims will now get the attention they deserved from the start. This episode of dropping quality assurance procedures and rushing through complex veterans’ claims should never be repeated. As Kucinich told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “a veteran deserves better.”