VA to prioritize disability claims more than 1 year old

“Issuing provisional decisions not only provides Veterans
with applicable benefits much more quickly, but also gives them an additional
one-year safety net to submit further evidence should it become available,”
Hickey said in a statement.

{mosads}The VA has come under heavy fire for its backlog of claims
that have not received a decision by the department’s goal of 125 days. 

The department has about 800,000 pending claims in its inventory,
and nearly 600,000 have waited more than 125 days.

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki has vowed to eliminate the
backlog by 2015.  

Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine), the top Democrat on the House
Veterans Affairs Committee, praised the department for Friday’s move. But he said that
it still did not resolve the underlying problem with the VA’s problems moving away
from paper records and into an electronic system.