Press Releases

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas), the Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, delivered the following opening remarks, as prepared, at the start of the subcommittee’s hearing on VA’s National Work Queue system, the system VA uses to process veterans’ and their survivors’ benefit claims:

The subcommittee will come to order.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here.

Today, we are here to take a closer look at the VA’s National Work Queue, also known as the NWQ, which electronically manages and distributes the majority of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s workload of VA benefits claims. 

In March 2013, the backlog of VA benefits claims peaked at over 600 thousand claims.

In response, VA created an electronic claims file system called the Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS) to electronically process veterans’ claims.

And in 2016, the NWQ was implemented to ensure that these paperless claims were efficiently processed. The NWQ avoids funneling claims through a single VA regional office. 

Instead, the NWQ uses pre-programmed rules to automatically distribute claims every day to RO’s across the country based on each RO’s capacity to take more claims.

I am pleased that the NWQ has largely decreased wait times for veterans waiting for decisions on their claims. Because of VA’s efforts, the backlog is half of what it was in 2013.

However, there is still room for the NWQ to improve in its goal of efficiently processing all veterans’ and survivors’ claims.  

Right now, the current system only allows the most recent VA employee who managed a claim to learn from when they have mistakenly undertaken unnecessary steps to obtain evidence. Therefore, most VA employees never learn from those mistakes, and they continue to conduct unnecessary development in other veterans’ claims.

Although the NWQ has improved wait times for general types of disability compensation claims, veterans and survivors who have filed special types of claims continue to experience long wait times for decisions.

Today we will take a closer look at the NWQ’s shortcomings when it comes to efficiently processing claims based on military sexual trauma and claims for survivors’ benefits.

In October 2023, VA attempted to address the backlog of 20 thousand MST claims by consolidating MST claims with the San Juan Puerto Rico RO. But since then, the backlog of MST claims has grown to more than 26 thousand. 

In reaction to this, VA designated the Roanoke RO as a temporary MST special mission site, effective April 1, 2024, and it remains to be seen whether this effort will be enough to work down the backlog. 

We have heard that this backlog was in part due to the NWQ automated claims establishment rules failing to properly label MST claims. As a result, claims processors across the country manually relabeled claims as MST claims, resulting in a higher number of MST claims being routed to the San Juan RO than VA prepared for.

There aren’t enough employees assigned to the San Juan RO to process all the MST claims.

Further, we continue to see backlogs in survivors’ benefits claims. At our full committee hearing in January 2024, we learned about how certain claims for Dependency and Indemnity Compensation filed by surviving spouses and surviving children are not being routed in a timely way through the NWQ.

Today, we will examine what steps VA has taken, and will take, to address the wait times that survivors are facing.

Every veteran and survivor has earned a timely decision on their claims. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today about how the NWQ can be improved to accomplish this goal.