PACP Committee Report

Conservatives demand accountability for Veterans Affairs service failures

Conservative members of the committee demand action to ensure veterans get the disability benefits they deserve.

Therefore, Conservative members recommend:

Recommendation #1 That Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) study the effects of automation to improve service time for veterans’ disability benefit applications.

Recommendation #2 That Performance, At-risk, and Bonus compensation for VAC executives be withheld until such time as the backlog of disability benefit claims has been cleared and the departmental service-standard target for assessing future applications is consistently met.

Background:

The Auditor General’s report shows a department in crisis.

VAC’s internal service-standard target for processing disability benefit applications is that they make a determination within 16 weeks of receiving all required documentation necessary to process the application in 80% of applications.[1] At the time of the audit, the median wait time for a decision on first-time applications for disability benefits was 39 weeks – more than double the service standard.[2] This means that half of all first time applications were even worse than that, and the average wait time VAC was 10 months for a decision on first applications.[3] This is not a new problem, as several oversight bodies have recommended measures to VAC to help improve application processing for veterans over the last seven years.[4]

Based on documents provided to the Office of the Auditor General by VAC, the decision process for the Disability Benefits program is as follows: VAC receives the application and documentation, then then request service health records for the veteran, and when those records are received, the application is verified for completeness and sent to an adjudicator who determines whether the disability is related to the veteran’s service and approves or denies the benefit claim.[5] As of 2021, there were a total of 43,227 disability benefit applications at various stages of the process including 10,290 that were deemed complete but had not had an adjudicator assigned, and 15,214 backlogged applications.[6] Since the audit period, 9,687 applications remain over the service standard. Further, in this fiscal year, 56% of disability benefits first applications have been completed within the service standard – an improvement from the previous year’s record of 46%.[7]

There appear to be two key elements associated with the backlog and significant delays in processing times: the time between an application being deemed “completed” and its assignation for adjudication, and the time taken by the adjudicator in assessing a completed application. The introduction of automation and AI technology into the adjudication process should help ease the workload for the adjudication staff and allow them to focus on only the most complex cases. Furthermore, both the Auditor General’s report[8] and witness testimony[9] outlined weaknesses in data collection and management associated with the disability benefit application process, including mismanagement and misplacing of veterans’ applications as a result of “human error”[10]. The introduction of automation and AI technology into the application process will minimize the capacity for human error while improving data collection and management.

Adding to their failure in getting disability benefits to veterans, according to the Treasury Board, Veterans Affairs Canada only met 13% of their departmental objectives.[11] Despite the failure of the Liberal government and the department to meet their objectives, VAC executives received an average of $13,757 in Performance Pay, an additional $13,181 in “At-risk” pay, and a still-further $4,560 in Bonus pay for the 2020-2021 fiscal year (the last year’s results that are currently available).[12] This represents a total of nearly $2.4M in undeserved bonuses paid to VAC executives in a single year.[13]

To continue to give over $30,000/year in bonuses to VAC executives while veterans wait for a year or more to receive their necessary disability benefits is unfair. To reward executives for the abject failure of their departments is simply poor practice.