Have you ever played the game “Whack-a-Mole?”

It’s the game you may happen upon at a county fair or arcade that requires you to whack the head of the mole with a rubber mallet as it sticks its’ head out of the hole. The object is to whack as many moles as you can in a specified time limit. Nobody ever gets all of the moles; all you get are points, which, in the end, are worthless.

I would like to use the “Whack-a-Mole” analogy in explaining a practice the VA uses with its regional offices. It is simply called “brokering,” and it is having a debilitating effect on the VA claims process.

Here is how it works: Currently VBA replaces lost staffing in regional offices according to the office’s ability to process claims. Specifically, the more productive an office is, the more staff they receive. While this policy may encourage management at an underperforming office in the short run, over time it magnifies the deficiencies at the underperforming office, resulting in disproportionate backlogs and extended delays for the veterans served by that office.

This policy has existed for at least the past five years. While VBA attempts to compensate by shifting or “brokering” work to other offices, this does not solve the problems at the underperforming offices. Further, while brokering cases is an excellent temporary measure to deal with workload fluctuations, it has become routine for some offices. Continuous brokering of work takes on the trappings of “Whack-a-Mole”; as soon as you push down the workload at one location, it rises dramatically in another.

The fact is, the policy of starving certain offices is counterproductive, both for employees and for the veterans they serve. If VBA is unable to provide those offices with the leadership, resources and training to make them productive, then it needs to develop the corporate, institutional and political courage to change the mission of those offices to something other than claims processing.

Whacking the mole may get the VBA some points in the short term, but for veterans waiting for their claims to be processed, the long-term result could prove to be worthless.

Bob Jackson is the Assistant Director for National Veterans Service for the VFW.  He continues to lobby Congress to improve the delivery of VA benefits and compensation to millions of our nation’s veterans.

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