St. Pete VA Employees Overwhelmed by Disability Claims Backlog

The Tampa Tribune recently reported that the St. Petersburg Veterans Affairs Regional Offices is struggling to keep up with the overload of Florida VA disability claims that is consistent with the national disability claims backlog. VA employees describe the working conditions as “toxic” complaining that the VA expects them to spend countless hours training on new systems designed to speed up claims without giving them the time to actually process claims. To make matters worse, according to the VA’s own report, the St. Pete office has spent over 20,000 lost hours working on these new systems that, to date, have proven to be failures.