By: Celeste E. Whittaker
National Archives at St. Louis, Stack Stairs to Military Records. Photo by Lenin Hurtado for the National Archives. Photo by Lenin Hurtado for the National Archives.
WASHINGTON — The VA will use millions of dollars from its American Rescue Plan grants to expand the scope of the digitization of federal records. One key goal is to reduce a backlog of record requests created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which plays a central role in ensuring that veterans’ claims for benefits get processed in a timely fashion, was severely impacted by the pandemic, which created a backlog of record requests at its record center in Missouri. The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis houses more than 2 million square feet of paper military records.
VA now has decided to use $150 million of its ARP grants to “expand the scope of Federal scanning to reduce claims processing delays and reduce the current claims backlog by half,” according to its website. The result will be that many records will be digitized before a benefit claim is filed for healthcare, home loans, burials, disability payments or other federal benefits.
Veterans discharged today have their personnel and medical records digitized. Personnel records digitization began 27 years ago, and most military medical records—or service treatment records—have been digitized since 2014.
Records for all veterans who ended their service before records digitization became available are stored at the NPRC. The VA is prioritizing records for veterans discharged from approximately 1965 to 1994 because most applications are expected to come from that group.
NPRC officials have said the transition to a remote working environment during the pandemic made it difficult to process all of the requests coming from the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) as well as other agencies. The result was a growing backlog.
In May, Congress sent a letter to the archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, to express concerns about the growing inventory.
William J. Bosanko, chief operating officer at NARA, had written a letter that month to DoD, advising that records requests backlog had reached more than a half-million requests. That number did not include VBA requests for records for disability claims, however, and that slowed records retrieval supporting those requests.
In his letter, Bosanko said the NARA was submitting a request for assistance to the DoD for supporting pandemic recovery operations at the NPRC.
“This RFA involves the off-site sorting and batching of approximately 400,000 Official Military Personnel Folders (OMPF) in preparation for refiling in the NPRC and the on-site refile of these records,” he said. “It also involves the on-site searching and retrieval of OMPFs to support eliminating a backlog of 500,000 public reference requests. It also involves the onsite digitization or photocopying of DD Forms 214 from these records and the dispatch of reproductions to public requesters.”
Only in Paper Form
Millions of cubic feet of military personnel and medical records at the NPRC facility can’t be accessed remotely, because they only exist in paper form, according to the letter, which pointed out that many are owned by the Military Departments and serviced by NARA on behalf of DoD.
“The NPRC responds to requests from veterans and their families who require copies of their military service records, primarily to prove honorable service in order to claim a service-related benefit,” Bosanko said. “In a typical year, the NPRC responds to more than 1.2 million requests for copies of those records or over 20,000 requests each week, most of which are completed in under 10 days. We have not been able to maintain our normal, high level of responsiveness during the pandemic.
“We have taken a number of actions to protect our workforce from exposure to COVID-19, including reducing the number of employees permitted in our facilities at one time and implementing strict social distancing procedures for on-site work. Unfortunately, these actions have reduced the speed and volume of requests that we can safely process at the NPRC, which has led to the development of a backlog of more than 400,000 records in need or refile and over 500,000 delayed requests, most from veterans who need copies of records to support their application for federal benefits.”
VA and NARA are worked together to build an on-site scanning capability for immediate scanning of records needed for pending claims. The plan is to scan several million records by September 2022, according to the VA.org site.
NPRC, which says it is answering VBA requests within three to five days, collaborated with VBA during the pandemic and helped reduce the backlog of claims-specific records requests from 80,000 to about 8,000.
In a letter to Ferriero in February 2021, Sen. Margaret Wood Hassan (D-NH) had implored him to swiftly implement a plan to address the growing of backlog veterans’ records requests using the emergency funding provided by Congress in the appropriations and COVID-19 relief package.
“As you know, veterans depend on timely access to the personnel, health, and medical records maintained by NPRC to access their Veterans Affairs benefits,” Wood Hassan wrote then. “The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the NPRC’s operations, with the St. Louis–based facility’s capacity for processing requests dramatically dropping, resulting in a growing backlog of open requests. … These delays in benefits can cause potentially irreparable harm to veterans’ health and financial well-being.”
She added, “I appreciate your response to my previous letter regarding the continuing delays in the processing of veterans’ records requests at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) that is part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Like you, I remain deeply concerned by the extensive backlog of record requests at the NPRC and the impact of this backlog on veterans. … I am encouraged by steps taken by NARA and NPRC leadership and employees to strengthen ties with the VA and to expand work shifts to expedite the processing of records requests. At the same time, more must clearly be done to reduce the significant backlog of requests while ensuring the safety of the NPRC workforce.”