Strategic Goal: Provide One VA world-class service to veterans and their families through the effective management of people, technology, processes, and financial resources. VA will operate as a veteran-focused organization that provides high quality, accessible, and timely information and service through the development and maintenance of a high-performing workforce, the application of state-of-the-art technologies, the continuous improvement of processes, and the effective allocation of dollars.

Objective: Improve VA’s overall governance and operational management, and access to benefits and services to meet or exceed the expectations of veterans and their families, while ensuring full compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and financial commitments.

Performance Goal: Reduce the appeals resolution time to 650 days.

Appeals resolution time is the average length of time it takes VA to process an appeal from the date a claimant files a Notice of Disagreement (NOD) until a case is resolved, including resolution at a regional office or a final decision by the Board of Veterans’ Appeals (BVA). This timeliness measure was adopted at the beginning of FY 1999 as a principal measure of performance relied upon by both BVA and VBA and is widely used in our Departmental strategic plans, budgets and performance plans. Although some improvements in BVA’s timeliness can be achieved unilaterally, such as those realized from reductions in administrative overhead and other initiatives involving internal procedural changes, others can only result from coordinated efforts undertaken by both BVA and VBA. Such an approach acknowledges that claims and appeals processing must be viewed as a continuum, rather than as a series of discrete activities. BVA is committed to this approach and has targeted improving appeals resolution time as our most important timeliness objective.

Remand rate reduction is a central component of our strategy for reducing appeals resolution time. Remands represent a rework phase of the appellate cycle and typically add two years to the processing time for an appeal. Remands delay not only the individually affected cases, but, because by law we must process the oldest cases first, processing of newer appeals is delayed when remanded appeals are returned to the Board for re-adjudication. One of our primary remand rate reduction strategies is to improve appellate processes through information sharing between BVA and field adjudication staff using regularly scheduled information exchange sessions conducted via interactive video-conference systems. A second strategy has been to develop and refine improved bases of information that can be used to better analyze trends concerning what types of cases have been remanded and why, so as to help focus efforts to avoid future remands.

Achievement of this performance goal is not directly dependent on other agencies.

There are no major management challenges that will affect achievement of this performance goal.

VACOLS, VA’s appeals tracking system and BVA’s main business system, serves as the exclusive source of all data used to calculate appeals resolution time.

Where feasible, edits have been built into the system to prevent data entry errors. There are checks and balances throughout the system to detect errors, and procedures are in place for correcting these errors.

(For additional information on this performance goal, refer to General Operating Expenses, Volume 4, Chapter 3D.)