With most veterans waiting nine months for the Department of Veterans Affairs to process disability claims, a congressional panel Wednesday chastised the VA and the Department of Defense for each breaking four years of vows to merge all troops’ medical records into a single electronic system to help crack that backlog. 

A senior defense official admitted to the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs that while “looking down the barrel” of Friday’s sequestration-mandated budget cuts, DOD recently opted not to simply link with the VA’s existing electronic health-record system but to instead seek a more cost-effective computerized tool to catalog and track its service members' medical files.

That explanation, however, sparked committee members to slam both agencies for protecting their individual turfs rather than fixing the lengthening wait for troops' claims to be seen and for disability checks to be cut. Further complicating that human math: Another 34,000 service members will return from Afghanistan during the next 12 months. 

“Dammit, it’s time to get over the excuses and get this fixed!” said Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. “We have brave men and women that are coming home in huge numbers right now. We don’t want to see these backlogs of benefits continue to escalate. What we need is you guys (VA and DOD) to work together.

“You’ve been given a directive by your President to get this done. My belief is you don’t have the will to do it,” Denham said. “Those who have volunteered at a time of war ... if they come home tomorrow, they ought to be in the (electronic-record) system tomorrow, knowing what benefits they will receive ... and that it doesn’t take a 5-day or a 50-day system. Get it right or we’re going to force you to get it right.” 

On Tuesday, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki acknowledged in a speech to the American Legion that effectively slashing its ballooning benefits backlog hinges, in part, on the full installation of an electronic record system. As of December, that backlog had reached more than 270 days, according to a VA website. 

In a separate but related move, Rep. Jeff Miller, R.-Fla., chair of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, urged VA leaders to fire “problematic employees” rather than to continually transfer them from one regional VA office to another — a bureaucratic shell game that “has contributed to major benefits backlogs at a number of VA regional offices across the country.” 

“It’s time to end that culture of complacency that has developed among some VA employees and replace it with a culture of accountability,” Miller told Shinseki and others Tuesday at the same American Legion gathering in Washington, D.C. “If a VA employee doesn’t want to do their job, the answer isn’t to move them to another VA office. The answer is to remove them from VA altogether.”

The committee hearing Wednesday was held to ask the two largest federal agencies to explain why they are — according to Miller, "doing a U-turn" — failing to honor a promise made to Congress as recently as last July to build a single, universal, electronic health-record system.

VA leaders testified they prefer their current electronic system, called VistA — on which, according to Congress, the VA already has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to install, and potentially billions more to improve. VA has been using VistA for decades. Miller said military “doctors in theater” have told him they prefer using the VA’s electronic-health-record system. In addition, more than 100 non-VA hospitals have implemented that technology.

Following the hearing, VA officials emailed a statement to NBC News reaffirming that the Department of Veterans Affairs and DOD remain “committed to a single, joint, electronic health record.” They also revealed that Shinseki on Tuesday called new Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to congratulate him on his Senate confirmation and that during the phone chat “both leaders emphasized their desire to meet soon and build on the strong partnership between the two departments on common priorities for troops, veterans, and military families.”

“In short, VA and DoD are seeking to achieve the same program goals: common data, common applications, and a common user interface, but we look to achieve them with less cost and less risk and accelerate the availability of needed functionality,” read the VA’s emailed statement. 

DOD chiefs, meanwhile, testified they are exploring several electronic health-record options — including "commercial" systems — to replace its current set-up, called Ahlta. And while the Defense Department said it is considering VistA as one option, its assessment found that system may be too clunky and costly to build across the entire armed services. 

"There is no infrastructure really right now for us to bring VistaA into 56 hospitals and 700 clinics and be able to configure it," testified Jonathan A. Woodson, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and director of TRICARE Management Activity. "The good news about VistA is it was ahead of its time ...

"(But) it's important for this program to skate to where the puck will be. What I mean by that is: The current VistA system is a generation 1-plus-2, in terms of how we look at electronic health records. Industry is already at a generation 3 and moving to a generation 4," Woodson said. "We would need to assess what's required for us to bring VistA over, modernize it, and (calculate) what the total cost of ownership would be over time." 

One veteran, who listened Wednesday to the techno-speak and budget explanations offered by the VA and DOD, urged the two agencies to find common ground fast.  

"Veterans are not getting the single system they were promised. As long as VA and DOD remain in separate camps, pursuing their own individual systems, it's the veterans that will be short-changed," said Jacob Gadd, deputy director for health care at the American Legion. 

"Getting all the information into one place can be the key to finally breaking the back of the backlog. But we don't have it," added Gadd, a former Navy hospital corpsman. "VA and DOD have spent four years and close to a billion dollars to develop this and we're in the same place we were in four years ago ... Until they fulfill the promise made to veterans of a single, seamless, unified record, the veterans of this country will remain skeptical of their government's ability to deliver on all of the promises made to them."  

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The average wait time for wounded veterans to see their disability-compensation claims completed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has now grown to 262 days — or nearly nine months — according to a federal website and three watchdog groups.

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki earlier this year vowed to shrink the so-called “VA backlog” to 125 days by 2015 as the agency finishes transitioning to a digital processing system.

Despite that promise, the claims-completion gap has expanded steadily during the past year. The VA’s benefits-aspiration web page shows the average claims-processing time was 223 days in October 2011, 246 days in April 2012, 257 days in July and 260 days in August. In fact, the backlog has doubled in size since 2008, congressional members report.

The agency called its widening claims backlog "unacceptable" but said it is taking steps to try to fix that problem.

"VA has completed a record-breaking 1 million claims per year the last three fiscal years. Yet too many Veterans have to wait too long to get the benefits they have earned and deserve," the VA said in a statement emailed to NBC News on Tuesday. "That’s unacceptable, and VA is building a strong foundation for a paperless, digital disability claims system — a lasting solution that will transform how we operate and eliminate the claims backlog. This paperless technology is being deployed to 18 regional offices in 2012, and it will reach all 56 VA Regional Offices by the end of 2013 to help deliver faster, better decisions for Veterans."

The move to paperless processing "will ensure we achieve" Shinseki's 2015 goal, the VA said, adding: "Fixing this decades-old problem isn’t easy, but we have an aggressive plan that is on track to succeed." In 2011, VA paid nearly $5 billion in compensation to wounded veterans, it reported. 

The VA cited four reasons for what it calls "claims growth": 

• Increased demand — "the result of 10 years of war" and due to many veterans returning "with severe, complex injuries";  
• in 2010, Shinseki decided the VA claims system should include the recognition of medical conditions related to Agent Orange exposure (240,000 claims were processed in 2011 for such exposure) as well as "Gulf War Illness"; 
• approximately 45 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are currently seeking compensation for injuries related to their service — and that marks a "historical high" for the VA following wars. Those claims include an average of eight to 10 medical issues per claim, more than double the Vietnam era;
• the VA says it is doing "better outreach" to veterans "to educate them about the benefits they’ve earned."

Still, the thickening backlog drew fire from veterans advocates and from Capitol Hill.

“These delays are indicative of a out-dated system," said Tom Tarantino, chief policy officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group representing more than 200,000 veterans.

"The Department of Veterans Affairs promises year after year that they'll reduce the backlog. Instead, it's gotten worse. While the reasons for this are complicated, the fact remains that these continuous delays greatly impact the daily lives of veterans who are waiting for care and benefits," Tarantino said. "Veterans deserve better.”

Last Wednesday, during a contentious hearing examining the VA’s spending and larger accountability, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, told VA Deputy Secretary Scott Gould “the truce is over” between Congress and Gould's agency. Miller became visibly frustrated during the hearing after Gould repeatedly said he could not or would not answer specific questions from committee members on spending and the agency’s internal discipline over admitted ethical missteps.

Told Tuesday that the claims backlog has nearly reached nine-months long on average, Miller said the wait time is another example of VA’s failure to keep its promises to veterans.

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“VA continues to tout its disability claims transformation plan to clean up the backlog by 2015. Without any details of the plan ... which continues to increase on a daily basis — and which has doubled in the past four years — I remain highly suspicious of any plan that claims to be able to reverse the problems in this process overnight,” Miller said in an email to NBC News.

“As Congress has said for many years now, VA needs to look at the root of the problem of the backlog — training, management, oversight, and technology — and work forward from those four points to address this problem,” Miller added. “Quick fixes will no longer work, and will continue to make veterans wait months, sometimes years, on end for an answer.”

While the VA said its pilot paperless program has cut average processing times from 250 days to 119 days at those test offices, veterans in seven other cities were still waiting — as of October — longer than one year, on average, for their disability claims to complete their trek through the VA pipeline, according to the VA’s online chart.

Those cities — and the average claims-processing times in their VA regional offices are: Waco, Texas (418 days), Los Angeles (394 days), New York City (380 days), Chicago (378 days), Oakland (377 days), Indianapolis (373 days), and Phoenix (365 days), according to the VA site.

In October 2011, no veterans were waiting more than a year, on average, for their disability claims to be processed, the VA site shows. In Waco, the average wait during October 2011 was 309 days. That means the backlog has increased in that city by 35 percent during the past year.

“Despite promises of an improvement, veterans wait about three months longer than they did in May 2011. In fact, the VA's own numbers show the average wait time veterans face has gotten longer every single month over the last year and a half,” said Aaron Glantz, a reporter with the Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Investigative Reporting.

The group keeps its own map, titled "Waiting For Help," which shows the backlog's highs and lows in individual cities. According to CIR's tally, 821,804 veterans now are waiting for their claims to be processed by the VA. That's actually a scrap of good news: it marks a slight decrease from in the number in that queue as compared to Aug. 25, when 899,000 veterans had compensation and pension claims pending. 

CIR describes itself as “the nation's oldest nonprofit investigative reporting organization.” Glantz acknowledges a personal interest in the backlog that stems from his years (2003 to 2005) working as a journalist in Iraq.

“Ever since I returned home, I've been deluged with phone calls and emails from veterans who say they returned home from the war to face a battle with the government for the benefits they earned,” Glantz said. “I've seen veterans fall into suicide and homelessness while they wait.

“Today, I received a call from a female Iraq war veteran who is living on the street with her 20-month daughter,” he added. “She has been waiting for two years for the VA to rule on her disability claim for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

In a related development, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs held an oversight hearing Tuesday to examine what it dubbed the tasks of “wading through warehouses of paper” and “the challenges of transitioning veterans records to paperless technology.” 

During the hearing, Rep. Jon Runyan, R-N.J., chairman of the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, called for tighter collaboration between the VA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Runyan said improving those communications would smooth the transition for veterans now exiting the armed services. 

“VA has a statutory duty to assist a claimant in obtaining certain records. Accordingly, it is important that we work together to ensure that VA is able to communicate both effectively and efficiently with both the National Archives and DoD to comply with this duty,” Runyan said. 

The subcommittee added in a news release after the hearing: “It was recently brought to light that DoD’s poor record-keeping habits have in turn had a negative impact on VA’s ability to fully carry out its responsibility to assist veterans in obtaining records from their time in service.” 

Said Runyan: “Issues pertaining to the thoroughness of DoD’s record keeping have recently received media attention in light of evidence that some units were not properly documenting in-service events, such as combat-related incidents. This has been a source of significant frustration for many veterans who file claims with VA and are dependent on such documentation to substantiate their claims.”

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Members of Congress angrily vowed Wednesday to crank its investigative floodlights far brighter on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, accusing agency leaders of dodging direct questions on travel and conference spending, failing to disclose a gathering in Las Vegas, and exhibiting “total incompetence” as veterans wait in record-long lines for medical help.

During a hearing before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said that one day after he and VA Deputy Secretary Scott Gould had held a “civil conversation” on the same issues, Gould’s vague responses to the panel's precise and lengthy interrogation “raised the hackles on the back of my neck.”

“The truce is over. It lasted less than 24 hours. Expect much more oversight from this committee,” Miller said. “Expect more questions from this committee because they’re coming — in great volumes.”

The fiery, two-hour hearing was primarily held to examine how the VA plans to prevent future, exorbitant spending lapses like the estimated $9 million the agency doled out for two Orlando gatherings in 2011. During those conferences for VA human resources personnel, the VA invested, for example, $84,000 for VA-branded promotional items, including pens, highlighters and hand sanitizers, according to Office of the Inspector General. But at the close of the hearing, Gould complained the committee’s line of questioning had devolved into “a slap at the employees who work at VA every day.”

Miller interrupted Gould.

“No, no, no, no,” Miller said, his voice rising. “Don’t you ever accuse a Democrat or a Republican on this committee of slapping any of the hardworking 300,000 VA employees. Rest assured, it’s the leadership that we’re concerned with.”

Earlier, Gould opened by describing the VA’s beefed-up oversight to block other Orlando-type escapades, which he called: “abdications of responsibility, failures of judgment, and serious lapses of stewardship.”

Those tightened measures include requirements that all VA conference planning now include “a detailed business case analysis.” And, from this point, any VA gatherings estimated to cost $20,000 to $100,000 must receive prior approval by a VA under secretary or assistant secretary, conferences estimated to cost $100,000 to $500,000 must be approved by the deputy secretary, and conferences costing more than $500,000 “are generally not permitted,” he said. 

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But the hearing quickly turned into larger prosecution of VA leadership by the committee. The members complained about what they called the VA’s chronic lack of responses — or its fuzzy answers — to dozens of congressional requests for information on items ranging from VA spending to its internal discipline of employees caught making ethical errors. 

For example, on Aug. 16, Congress asked the VA to disclose how much it spent during 2011 on conferences. According to Miller, the VA first reported the price of those events was $20 million but later amended that figure to more than $100 million. At Wednesday’s hearing, VA Chief Financial Officer Todd Grams testified that the events cost, in total, $86.5 million.

Miller asked Gould if he “or anyone at the table” had been ordered to withhold information from Congress. Gould responded: “No.” Miller then blasted VA leaders for failing to answer 75 specific congressional questions.

“Unfortunately, lengthy delays or not responding to requests at all has become normal for VA,” Miller said. “We clearly have a problem here.”

The Orlando conferences had served as the initial spark for ramped up congressional scrutiny of the agency. But several members said the VA’s lack of answers had left them increasingly irked — and several members sounded so Wednesday, their voices sometimes breaking or shaking, including Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan.

“It’s been 106 days since I asked some of these questions. I have asked for: a list of the attendees at the July 2011 conference in Orlando; a list of attendees at the August 2011 conference in Orlando; a list of individuals involved in planning these conferences; the names and titles of employees who are being held accountable. Why have you refused to answer all of these?” Huelskamp asked Gould. “Those were all ignored. When will you find it out — in another 106 days? These are simple questions.

“This is an issue of competence, the failure to either know the answers or refuse to answer them,” Huelskamp added. “It’s about a gentleman in Syracuse, Kan., who had to drive 522 miles to the nearest VA hospital. In that time, you could fly folks to Orlando for a great conference. And you won’t even tell the American people who attended? Either you’re trying to hide something or it’s total incompetence.”

In response, Gould testified that VA leaders “understand we have an obligation to respond to Congress.” He further testified that, following the many information requests from Congress, the VA has supplied 35,000 documents and answered 6,000 policy questions and attended 100 hearings and 1,100 staff briefings.

“Sir,” Gould added, “you can sit here and shake your head, but the reality is there’s a tremendous amount of information that flows to this committee and others on a daily basis by a very competent team.”

But Congress has grown so impatient with the VA’s silence on the issues, Miller said, he and other congressional members and their staffs have begun perusing VA’s Facebook and Twitter accounts to try to independently piece together a more complete list of the VA conferences and training seminars.

Miller discovered, for example, posts on the VA Facebook page about a VA senior management conference at Las Vegas' Venetian Hotel in August 2010. That event included teachings on “yoga, massage therapy (and) acupuncture,” according to the VA Facebook post, which showed pictures of people — ostensibly VA employees — getting massages. Beneath those images, someone commented: “Sounds like my kind of conference!” That observation was followed by a comment posted by the administrator of the Facebook page for VA’s Veterans Canteen Services: “It’s amazing how immediate the results are!”

Miller asked Gould why the VA had not mentioned the Vegas conference when Congress had requested a full accounting of all VA conferences since 2005.

Gould testified that he had no explanation other than the VA has hosted thousands of conferences since 2005.

That post on the VA Facebook page was removed shortly after the hearing. 

“The perception out there, if you’re a taxpayer just barely getting by ... is you’ve got one set of rules for people in government, and (another set for) the rest of us out there in the real world, said Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn. “And perception is reality.

"It’s embarrassing for me to go home and try to explain to people why their money is being wasted,” added Roe, a physician. “I have veterans who come up and say, ‘I can’t get into a hospital down here, Doc. I’m in a line 40 miles long.’ And then they show me this plush event that occurred in Orlando. It’s very hard to explain that to people. It’s embarrassing for the 300,000 hardworking VA people who are then tagged with this.” 

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Congressional members charged with overseeing the interests of former American service members have asked the Department of Veterans Affairs for a briefing to explain why its "work study" program is often months late paying many of its employees: college students who served in the military. 

Kami Fluetsch

Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Ashley Metcalf, now a student at the University of Colorado Denver, says he and other students employed by the VA to help fellow vets transition into college frequently wait months for VA wages to arrive.

The House Committee on Veterans Affairs issued that request of VA officials on Wednesday, one day after NBC News reported student veterans hired by the VA to help fellow ex-service members transition into college have routinely waited one to two months — and, in one case, four months — for unpaid wages. Delayed compensation from the VA has caused eviction worries and mounting debt among some of those student veterans. 

A call by NBC News to VA media relations officials Wednesday seeking comment on the Congressional briefing was not returned by Thursday morning. 

Rep. Jeff Miller, R. Fla., chairman of the committee on veterans affairs, said the VA's sluggish payment-pipeline seems to be "just another example" of a federal agency purposely sticking to outmoded practices versus modernizing its approach in order to help veterans. He also called for a wholesale streamlining in the way student veterans who work for the VA on campuses across the nation are reimbursed for their hours logged on the job.

"It is my understanding that VA's policy is to have student veterans accumulate 50 to 100 hours of work before submitting their claim for payment to VA. That payment schedule is counterintuitive to how people pay their living expenses," Miller said. 

"Therefore, GI Bill work study participants should be able to verify their working hours on a calendar basis, similar to the way Montgomery GI Bill students verify their enrollment on a monthly basis, as they have for decades," Miller added. "VA has the technology to set up the system in this way already. So, this problem appears to be just another example of government bureaucracy being satisfied with business as usual instead of evolving to serve veterans more efficiently."

Ashley Metcalf, a student veteran — and a "work study" employee who uncovered the scope of the payment snags via a survey of 18 colleges — said Miller's plan to fix the issue would solve the VA's payment snags. 

"He's absolutely correct," said Metcalf, an Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I started school under the Montgomery GI bill in 2007 and used that online system to verify my school attendance. This option seems like a solution that simply requires reallocating resources and tweaking the system a bit to fit work study requirements."

Metcalf, a student at the University of Colorado Denver, told NBC News he's been living on credit cards since June and was forced to obtain an emergency loan because the VA has failed to compensate him for about 100 hours he's logged in the VA work study program. 

According to the VA website, the “work-study allowance” is available through the post-9/11 GI Bill. Student veterans employed by the program earn the minimum wage from the VA for devoting hours to specified, on-campus jobs such as “providing assistance to veteran students with general inquiries about veteran benefits,” the site says, adding: "VA will pay you each time you complete 50 hours of service."

But Metcalf's survey earlier this year found VA work-study employees at five campuses who reported waiting one month to two months for payments — and a student in North Dakota who was not compensated for four months. (Among the 18 schools represented in the survey were Texas A&M, Florida State and the University of Kentucky). Survey participants also revealed that a number of student veterans have quit their work-study jobs due to the chronic payment delays, hamstringing veteran-services departments at some campuses. 

On Wednesday, a VA spokesperson offered an e-mailed reaction to Metcalf's survey results, in part putting the onus back on colleges where work-study employees have been hired to help fellow vets: "VA will review any issues with the work-study to ensure payments are delivered in a timely manner. To allow more timely payments to work-study students, our regional processing offices recommend that employers submit time records to the work-study coordinator once 50 work hours have been accrued. In some cases, time records are submitted after a student has accrued 100 or more hours."

The same e-mail from VA added: "VA regional processing offices for work-study typically process time cards quickly, on average less than a week."

"The word 'typically' would suggest that we are an anomaly. And that’s not by any means the case," Metcalf responded. 

Beyond finding delayed VA payments to student veterans at more than a dozen campuses covered by his survey, Metcalf said student veterans in two additional states — Michigan and Washington — contacted him after NBC News reported the glitches and added  their late-payment complaints to the growing list. 

"If we were an anomaly, it would only be happening to us," Metcalf said. "Before we even sent out the survey, we called different schools and different organizations. We went online to find out if other schools are having the same issue. That’s the reason we started the survey — we were talking to student veterans who were all having the same problems in different states."

He also responded to the VA's claim of "typically" processing time cards in less than a week with one word: "preposterous."

According to Metcalf and many of the students he surveyed at the 18 other colleges, the VA has frequently failed to respond to calls and e-mails from student veterans seeking to learn when their owed wages would be arriving and asking for explanations for the compensation holdups. 

"We’ve been trying to tell them," Metcalf said, "and no one there is listening."

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