An audit of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ delivery of rehabilitation and compensation services to its clients has found that while most are completed on time, some take an “excessively long period” and impact on the veterans and their dependents concerned.
In his report Efficiency of veterans’ service delivery by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Auditor-General, Grant Hehir contributed the delays to inefficient handling.
“The majority of DVA Rehabilitation and Compensation services are being delivered to veterans and their dependents within DVA’s time-based performance targets,” Mr Hehir said.
“However, a minority of claims take an excessively long period to process due to inefficient handling. These delays can have significant impacts for these veterans.”
He said the audit identified weaknesses in DVA’s business systems and processes.
In particular, DVA should improve the structure and consistency of workflow management for rehabilitation and compensation claims, and review its highly segmented approach to processing claims under the various elements of applicable legislation.
“DVA’s focus on monitoring the median and the average time taken to process across the population of claims does not provide a sufficiently complete picture of performance, and does not address critical reputational and client welfare risks,” Mr Hehir said.
“For claims with a high time taken to process, the audit identified that this stemmed from excessive time associated with ‘inactivity’ (delays in the actioning of a claim despite the presence of required information) and medical reviews.”
He said the DVA should improve its oversight of the progress of individual claims as the monitoring and reporting of claims was not effective in alerting management to those which were at risk of taking excessive time to process.
The auditor made six recommendations, all of which were agreed to by DVA.
The Auditor-General’s 64-page report can be accessed at this PS News link and the audit team was Peter Bell, Susan Ryan, Emily Urquhart, Brendon Gittins and Paul Bryant.
