 Next, we're going to get to our special guest that we have with us today. Danny Pummel was appointing Acting Undersecretary for Benefits in the Department of Veterans Affairs on October 19, 2015. In his position, he leads more than 20,000 employees through a nationwide network of 56 regional offices, special processing centers, and VBA headquarters. He directs the execution of nearly 90 billion in direct benefits to veterans and their dependents. Mr. Pummel was retired as a colonel from the United States Army after serving 33 years. He served as an adjunct general corps officer and an enlisted field artillery and infantry soldier in a variety of assignments. He has served at every level in the Army from squad through headquarters department of the Army. Commanding two separate battalions, his duties have taken him to Panama, Central America, Korea, Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and other various locations throughout the United States. Please give a warm welcome to Mr. Pummel as he will provide you with an update on the current VBA activities. Yeah, 33 years in the Army and I can't work a clicker. You can tell I was a colonel. I'm not a sergeant when I retire. Good morning, everybody. I am honored to be here when Gary and Jim invited me to come speak at the DAV. I initially told them yes. As you know, there's a lot of things going on in the world of VA right now. We had a couple of judges that wanted me to be someplace else this morning. But through a lot of manipulation over the weekend, we were able to work it out so that I could come here instead because I think this is more important. Just so you know, I belong to lots of the veteran service organizations because I think it's the right thing to do. But I'm only a life member of one. Guess which one it is? Yeah. And when I go through this brief, you'll see why I have done that. And it was a long time ago before I even got into this job. And every time I look at the statistics, I realize that I made the right decision when I made my decision. You two guys don't look at all like your picture. But I'd love to be in the office to hear you interact. That must be really interesting. What I'm going to do this morning is I'm just going to take you through a briefing and show you the state of where we are in VBA today, what's happening in VBA, what we've done, where we're going with the new secretary, Secretary Bob, as everybody calls him. I've all heard from Sloane Gibson, who came in and spoke yesterday, used to run the USO for the United States. I like working for him, very impressive, very eager, honest guy wants to do the right thing. And it's a pleasure working for him and Bob McDonald. This is the first slide. Basically it's thanking DAV, 270 national service officers, 100 offices, representation to 340,000 veterans. And then when I get through the briefing here, you're going to see that in 14 and 15, you all submitted more claims than any other veteran service organization and the most fully developed claims compared to the other veteran service organizations. And the most electronic compensation claims of any VSO for two years in a row, 10,014 triple to 30,015. And we're already seeing where that number is easily going to double or triple this year. That's huge. It's huge from the perspective of that you're most important, you're helping veterans. You're making sure that veterans get the compensation benefits and services that they've earned in service to this nation. But equally, the important is every claim that you all do, and when I get through the briefing here, and you see the big numbers that DAV is doing for the fully developed claims, those are claims that somebody in the federal government doesn't have to do. So you guys are saving the taxpayers a tremendous amount of money by doing this. And frankly, while the most important thing is taking care of the veterans, we can't discount what it does for the taxpayers. You look at our nation, you look at the deficit and some of the costs we have right now, anything that we can do as citizens or organizations to support the government, to support the agencies that have supported this country, it's the right thing to do. Take a little bit of burden off the back of the taxpayers here. This is just a overall slide that shows the things that we're doing inside of the Veterans Benefits Administration. Going around there, you can see education, compensation, pension, fiduciary. The bottom line is that circle in the center, 22,000 employees. Last year we paid out $96 billion in benefits to veterans, $96 billion. This year we're going to pay out $106 billion in benefits to veterans. This is up from five years ago when we only paid about between $49 and $52 billion a year. So that means that we're paying more money to more veterans, approving more claims than we ever had in the history of the VA. Not only are we paying more in claims, we're doing more education, we're doing more fiduciary, we're doing more home loans. As a matter of fact, we are the number one home loan servicer in the country. And during the recent home loan crisis where people were losing their homes to bankruptcies for closures and short sales, the VA had the best record of anybody in the nation at keeping people in their homes. And we did that by making telephone calls to individual veterans and trying to work with them one on one to help them. We couldn't do it in every case, but we did the best we could to try to keep veterans in their homes. The key to us was a veteran has a place to live. This is the, I talked about coming up from about $50 billion in claims to $90 billion in claims. Along with that, our workload increased. Our workload in the last five years has gone up 132%. That goes back to what I said at the beginning. There's no way that we can continue on this glide path. And we couldn't have got from that 2.74 million issues to the 6.35 million issues without veteran service organizations helping us with the claims. You guys did over 100,000 claims for us last year. And you're probably gonna do more this year. I'll get more into the numbers in a little bit. We expect that number, that glide path to continue to rise. One of the things people forget when they send a nation to war is that right now, the bulk of our claims are pretty much the Vietnam era veteran. Service members and the men and women that served in Vietnam. About 10, 15, 20 years after war, that's when we start getting older. And the little things that happened to us while we were serving, particularly in combat zones, start to become more aggravated and you have a lot more issues. Think of all the young men and women right now that have served Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan, multiple deployments. And all the issues that they're going to have into the future. They're gonna be our next generation, it doesn't go away. And that still isn't over, they're still over there fighting. They're still over there risking their lives and limb to serve this nation. We gotta make sure that we have the service and benefits in place in the future. And veteran service organizations helping us because that line's gonna keep going up. It's gonna keep going up because it should go up. We should be providing benefits and services to our veterans. Somebody asked me the other day, I was prepping for a hearing up in front of Congress, Chairman Miller and his crew. And they were looking at the numbers and saying, wow, you guys are paying out a lot more compensation. Aren't you concerned that you're paying out a little bit too much? And I go, no, I'm not concerned at all. I think that veterans today are more educated than they ever have been in the history. Good examples, those commercials we just saw up here, those are huge. Veterans are gonna see those commercials and veterans that haven't taken opportunity of the benefits and services that are available for them, are gonna see those advertisements. They're gonna call up your DAV representatives out there. And then they're gonna be requesting compensation, pension, fiduciary, home loans, education. All the things that they have earned serving this nation. And that's a good thing because that leads to a strong nation because it keeps our recruiting up and retention in our military surfaces. It's all a great big giant circle. Probably the biggest thing people talk about is PTSD. And at the end of that conversation it was, do you think that PTSD is overprescribed that too many people are applying for PTSD? And I say, I personally feel the exact opposite. I feel that PTSD is undersubscribed and not enough people are applying for PTSD. I can tell you right now off the top of my head, without even thinking, the names of ten friends and acquaintances who have PTSD who won't get help for it. And they won't get help for it for a lot of reasons. They're too proud, they have a security clearance, they don't want their family to find out, they're doing other things. They're afraid to impact on their job or their education, things like that. I'm one of those people that believe that if you serve in the military, whether you want to combat or not, it changes you. And if you serve in combat and the things that you go through, even training for combat and stuff like that, it changes you fundamentally inside for the rest of your life. And that everybody needs to get some kind of help, some kind of counseling. Or at least people to talk to. That's where the veteran service organizations come in handy. It's getting groups of men and women together on a regular basis where they can talk about some of these issues. But from the PTSD perspective, I think more people need to apply for PTSD, I think we should screen everybody for PTSD. And I wish there was some kind of test or something that we could give somebody because I think it's a lot worse than anybody really thinks it is. We got to get a handle on it. This is our compensation education voc rehab. And this is just to show that not just our claims have gone up, but everything is going up. That glide path is an actual glide path that shows where we're going. And you can see the arrow is going up, it's not going to level out, it's not going to come down. We got more and more veterans that are more and more educated. They're going to have access to the benefits and services. They know how to use them and they're going to come in and be filing their claims mostly through the veteran service organizations like yours. This is just a list of things that we have done over the past couple years. When I came to the VA in 2010 from the Department of the Army, it was an interesting story. I got called by the Secretary Shinseki's office and the then chief of staff asked me if I was interested in coming over to work for the VA. And I told him, no. And he said, why not? And I said, well, because the VA sucks. And he said, so he said, what? And I said, well, the VA sucks. And he goes, it certainly does not. And I go, well, it's here's, and I talked about here's my claim, here's what I went through. Here's my attempts to get through on the telephone and things like that. And he says, well, get over here and talk to me. Well, I got over there. Of course, they don't talk to you. They send you into Secretary Shinseki's office. That it's a whole new approach because he's such a great man and he starts telling you about the things that are going on and the help he needs. Of all places to put me, they put me in compensation and pension service. They made me the deputy under the director of compensation and pension. I couldn't even spell compensation and pension. You guys did my claim for me. I couldn't figure it out. It was too complicated. Well, I got in there and I thought, okay, how bad can this be? Okay, it's 2010, guess what? No automation, paper. How did we get to 2010 in the United States of America and we're doing benefits and compensation and home loans and education, a voc rehab fiduciary for veterans of this country. And we don't have an automated system. It was nuts. They took me to a regional office where they showed me a claim that was higher than I was. It was that tall. It was a six foot, one inch tall claim. I'm six foot tall. Of course, it's hard to pile it that high, but you know. So how do you possibly go through that? How do you possibly get a claim done in any amount of time when you have that much paper? And it wasn't just compensation. It was everything that we did was like that. Well, over the years, we've now automated our education program. We've automated the fiduciary program. We've automated the death benefits. We're in the process of automating the claims process. We're not completely there with VBMS. There's still a lot of things that we have to do to make it better. But most of this has been done in the last two, the last two and a half years through the VBA transformation. I'm proud of what they've done. Some people complain about the amount of money that we spent to get an automated system. I've dealt with a lot of automated systems. I worked for the federal government for almost 43 years now. I have never seen an automated system that we're able to put in place that costs this little amount of money, because I think it was a little amount of money, that was this effective in this short of time. Look at all the other automation systems out there in the federal government that don't work. This one works. I'm waiting for somebody to write a book. I'm hoping that Alice and Hickey, my predecessor, will come back and write a book about the transformation, about how effective this was, and how much did it change the life for veterans. A lot of the things that you see on here that we've done, reducing the backlog 87%, inventory by 60%, improving accuracy, all that 18 month period, that was because of an automation system that we didn't have before, because people were using paper. I can tell you today, and I'm proud to say it, that we are now 100% automated in the claims process. And we're very close to being 100% automated. When you send mail to us, all the mail's going to go to one location. It's going to get scanned. We're not going to lose mail anymore. We'll have everything. We'll be able to associate it with a claim, with a claim number. And that's something that really should have been done in the 70s or 80s in this country. It shouldn't have had to wait till 2010 to happen. But now it's finally happened, and we're finally on the right track. This is a pictorial depiction of the claims process. You can see where we were all the way out there in 2009, 2010. And then you can see we put things on there about the transformation. You see the agent orange, the little circle. That had part to do with this, but not a huge part. The aging of the Vietnam era veterans coming in. This same thing's going to happen for Iraq Afghanistan veterans. It's going to happen with the Desert Shield Desert Storm veterans, because it happened with the Vietnam veterans, happened with the Korea veterans, the World War II veterans. We know this is going to happen in our history. We go to war. We plan for war. We go to Congress. We request a budget to fight the war, to do all the things that need to be for war. But we don't realize that sometime in the future there's going to be a bill to the American people, and that bill is more than just money. The bill is broken bodies, broken minds that are going to happen in the future, because those are one of the repercussions of war. So that hill, if you ran the history of the United States, the wars of the United States, all the way back to the Revolutionary War, you would see that over time after every single war. So how do we get, we're down here to 82,500 claims right now. And in our peak, we are at 611,000 claims. We attacked it pretty well. We got a handle on it. How do we make sure that doesn't happen again? How do we make sure that it stays between 80 and 100,000 down here at the bottom, and that we anticipate the influxes of veterans from the current conflicts that we're doing right now, and make sure we're taking care of it? Well, I'll tell you how we do it. We do it by partnering with the veteran service organizations. We use your expertise. We use your ability to get out there to the grassroots and the communities down to the individual veteran level. We use your ability to help us with fully developed claims, to help us with our appeals process, things like that, so that we can get ahead of this bubble and defeat it before it happens. I am not a big believer that we have to continue to throw money and manpower against this. I think if we work together with the government, the veteran service organizations, local nonprofits, local businesses, and just the American people veterans out there, that together you can make it work instead of relying on just one agency or one group to do it. This shows our transformation goals for quality. I think the most important thing on here is the chart across the bottom. If you see there, it says rolling 12-month averages, it shows you the things that we're measured on. Claims issued, inferred issues, development letters, and if you look at the numbers across the bottom, you see that we're at 98.6%, 99%, 99.8%, 97%, 98.8%. Now, if you look at the bottom, the total, statistically, if you take all of those and you do a quantitative analysis on them, you only come up with 88.8%. So in order to get a higher than a 90%, you literally have to be at 100% in everything. Well, guess what, guys? There's nothing in this world that's 100%. You can't do anything at 100%. So my pledge to you is that we're gonna do the best we can, we're gonna stay on top of our quality, we're gonna continue to push our quality, but I think our quality between 95 and 98%, that should always be our goal. You literally can't get past 98%, it can't be done. We've had outside agencies come in and look at our quality and say, how can we get from 98% to 100%, how do we get there? They say, you can't. It's just, it's not possible in a human process to get to 100%. If you have a manufacturing process, you can do that. You can fine-tone the screws and the edges and the mathematics and stuff, but you can't do that with human beings. When you're dealing with human beings, there's always gonna be a little bit of error in there, and that's okay because it's the right thing to do, but we'll continue to push it. Some of the important things that we have done, the VBMS system, the automated system I was talking about, one of the biggest advantages of the VBMS system is that for the first time ever now, we can look at my level at my office and I can see what mistakes people are making. I can see if a individual in St. Louis is making a mistake, or I can see if the whole St. Louis office is making a mistake, or a team in Florida is making a mistake, or the whole country is making a mistake. We can direct our training now. I can retrain an individual if that individual keeps doing the same thing wrong all the time. I can retrain a team if the team's getting it wrong. I can retrain a regional office, or if it's systematic to all of VBA, we can retrain all of VBA. We have to do this same thing with the appeals process. I have to be able to know inside the appeals process where the issues are, what's happening, so that I can redirect training so that I can prevent some of the appeals from ever getting into the appeals process. So nice thing about automation, it gives you that opportunity to dig back, find out where you're making mistakes, and more importantly to train your people on correcting those mistakes before they happen. Today the average days that a veteran's waiting for a claim is 91 days. That's a 191 day reduction from the 280 days that it was taking in March of 2013. The average days it completes to complete a claim is 128 days, that's a 59 day reduction. We want to get that lower. We want to make a claim available to a veteran as quickly as we possibly can. Fully developed claims gonna help us with that. The benefits delivery on discharge, quick start. There's lots of things that we're working right now to try to speed that up. People ask me, well pretty soon you're gonna have zero claims in your backlog. You're gonna have zero claims over 125 days. No we're not. We're always gonna have claims over 125 days in our backlog. There's lots of reasons where a claim can't get done. Once again, we're dealing with human beings. Somebody adds something to their claim or it's a very complex claim involving radiation or it's a claim where we're having a hard time getting records and we have to go out and get buddy statements and stuff like that. There's always gonna be individual issues and when you're dealing with one and a quarter million veterans a year, even if a small percentage, one tenth of one hundredth of a percent of those veterans have issues with their claims, the numbers are already up to 50, 60, 70,000 claims. I personally believe that we're always gonna have between 80 and 100,000 claims that over 125 days, I'll commit to you that will push really hard to make sure that those claims don't languish out there and that we're doing special care for those veterans but the vast majority of our claims we wanna have done in under about 100 days and that's our goal and if you set your standards high we'll continue to eat away at that and push that down. This is one of the slides that I really like. This is the total rating receipts on the left from DAV and on the right is the fully developed claims received from the DAV. You can see in 2014, y'all did 216,000 rating receipts for us, up 234,000 for 15 and it already looks like it's on track to exceed that by 15 to 20% in 2016. More important is the fully developed claims over there. One of the things that I had talked to Gary when we had a little conversation this morning was these don't just equate to claims. These are individuals. These are human beings. You saw that number, that 611,000 backlog. These are 100,000 veterans out of there that y'all did for us, that you did a fully developed claim. There's 100,000 veterans there that the tax payers didn't have to pay the most expensive part of our claim which is the development phase. Trying to develop the claim. Get the records, get the information, talk to the individual, talk to buddies, get buddies, all the things that you have to do to develop that claim. That's the most time consuming, most expensive. We have a national organization out here helping us do that. That's better for veterans, better for the country, better for VA, that's a pretty neat thing. The other VSOs are doing the same thing for us but they're not at the level that you guys are at right now. You guys are the best and you're the best by a long stretch right now. My favorite subject, appeals. We have a problem in our appeals process. I am sure when Sloan Gibson talked to you yesterday he said in what world would an appeals process that takes as long as we're taking to an appeal to be acceptable for veterans and for this nation? That's not acceptable. It's wrong. It's broken. It's been broken for a long time. We have to fix it. Part of the reason it's broken is we put all of our emphasis on the claims backlog for the last couple of years, okay? I'm not gonna stand up here all the, you that know me know I'm a pretty straightforward guy. We put a tremendous amount of effort on the claims backlog, okay? We didn't let appeals, we didn't let fiduciary education or anything fall by the sideline. You saw that chart before. We brought those all up a little bit but you know what, here's the claims. We brought them up like that and here's everything else we brought them up like that. So how do we fix VBA? How do we get to the system where we don't let the crisis desure destroy everything that we're doing, okay? How do we, how do I attack the appeals process now and not let everything else go by the wayside? I've committed to Sloan Gibson and Bob McDonald that will provide them a campaign plan that says here's how we're gonna attack the appeals, here's how we're gonna work the appeals but we're gonna do it in a way we're not gonna let everything else go to hell for want of a better word. So we're not playing whack-a-mole so that I don't solve the appeals process and three years later I've got something else that is just as big that has popped up there but once again, we can't do this by ourself inside of VBA. It's not possible for us to do this. It's gonna take a huge commitment and a lot of help by the VSOs. The first help that we're asking for is the depth sex Sloan asked all the veteran service organizations and you guys have taken the lead in this once again to do a three-day offsite with VBA and to sit down, go through the appeals process and map it out and figure out is there a better way of doing this? How do we do this better from the veteran perspective and you guys know the veteran perspective better than anybody. How do we change what we're doing so we can do it faster, do it fair, the veterans know what's gonna happen and there's some consistency and an idea of what's gonna happen in the system. So you know what's gonna happen to you. One of the big things we have to change is nobody can understand our documents. You get our documents back and you look at them and you're trying to figure out, okay, what the hell does this mean? I got something from the VA. It looks like they denied my claim but I don't know what they denied or what's going on. Well, somebody asked me the other day, they said, hey, this veteran's really upset. He got his claim back. We denied his appeal at the drill level and he doesn't understand what we've said on here and I said, oh, it's those legal medical terms. Give it to me, let me take a look at it. They brought it to me. I have no freaking idea what it means. I could not understand it. I called a doctor friend and I said, hey, this claim says that we did this and this and this. What does that mean? Just a second, let me look that up, he says. So that's our doc. That's a VA doc doing this. So I said, okay, something's wrong. I got it that there's a legal process in the United States that's very important. I know words are very, very important. I know that from experience because I say the wrong thing all the time. So I know it's important to have those legal words on there but why can't we put in plain language a sheet on the top of that that says, Sergeant Smith, we denied your claim because you didn't bring us a copy of your last X-ray on your knee from your doctor. If you could get a copy of that X-ray and bring it in or bring it to the DAV and have them bring it in or you come to us and we'll do the X-ray, then we can look at that, we can determine your claim. We don't say that. We use all these big fancy words and we reference Title 38, we reference the Vassar D and the Physician's Desk Reference Librarian and nobody can figure out what the hell we're saying. Our smart guys that do the claim, they know it inside now but they're not the one filing the claim, they're the one doing it. So we have to do that. The status quo in the appeals process is not acceptable. It shouldn't be acceptable for veterans, it's not acceptable for taxpayers. We have to figure out that. The bottom line on this slide is how do we come up with the simplified appeals process that's timely, simple, fair and provides a final answer. One of the things that we're doing because of the, a lot of pressure from the Veterans Service Organizations, particularly the DAV, is in the last couple weeks we've put more people on our appeals process inside of our regional offices. I have taken all of our overtime that was given to the decision review officers to do claims, they're no longer allowed to do that. Now they have to work on appeals in overtime and last week we were able to get an additional $10 million and that entire $10 million went to overtime for DROs to process appeals, okay? You clap now but that's not gonna put a big dent in it. I loved the commercials that you guys sent up here. I wished, and I asked Gary, I said, who did those? And he said, we did them in-house. I mean, we gotta figure out who you're in-house. People are, those are brilliant. That's, you know, you guys did a great job. Did he really? You? I need to get your name after this. Guess who he works for now. No. One of our biggest problems is, how do you appeal to today's veterans? How do you use social media? We're terrible at that. We're still, remember I talked about our paper process and everything? We're horrible at doing that kind of stuff. You guys broke the code. I was engaged, those were, they were just long enough to catch your intention. I mean, I had no idea that there were seven ways you could do an appeal, do a claim. You know, I'm the acting undersecretary for benefits. I didn't know that if you screwed up Invoke Rehab that you could file an appeal or a claim on that. I had no idea. I knew the rest of them, but I didn't know that one. So I learned something in a 30-second thing that I'll probably never forget, from those two little stick guys. You did a really good job, stick guys. Yeah. So how do we do that? We gotta get you guys help. We gotta educate veterans. We gotta tell them, here's how the process works. We gotta get rid of all the legal garbage, all the medical garbage, so they know what they need. We have to have the decision review officers back into the ROs where a veteran could come into the RO office with their VSO representative, sit down with the decision review officer saying, here's what we found, here's what we need, resolve it at that level and resolve it quickly. Somehow we gotta get through. We have about a 400,000 veteran backlog and appeals. I gotta get that knocked out. We gotta get that undone and I think with you guys help, we can get that done and I'm really looking forward to see what we come out of in that three-day process. This is a little bit about our national work queue. The national work queue, we rolled it out last week to eight stations and it's in a pilot right now. My intent is if the pilot works to roll it out to two larger stations later on this week and then they're gonna come back and brief me and if it continues to work well, then we'll roll it out across the nation. What this does is because we're fully automated now, we have automated claims process and we have an automated mail process, we have the ability to do a claim anywhere in the country. Now a lot of people have come to me and said, wait a second, that's not gonna be good because you took Johnny's claim and you didn't now pass so and I'm here in Roanoke, Virginia, how can I help Johnny on the claim? Well, what this does, this gives us the ability to send the claim to the next available person wherever they are in the country to do that claim when they have the capacity to do that claim. It also gives us the ability to find people that are really good, that are experts at certain kind of claims like PTSD or back injuries or knee injuries or TBI and to make sure that they get the claims so that we can raise the quality of the claims so we can do the claims faster. It doesn't take away your ability to do the claim, you will still, as a veteran service officer, still be able to look at any claim anywhere in the country. You'll still be able to go into any RO and review that claim and the DRO in your state will still be doing that claim for the people in your state. Now the first checkpoint in the national work queue is the computer says, is there availability in this state, in this RO, to do the claim? We want it done in that state if at all possible. If we can't do it in that state, then we send the claim to where it can be electronically done the quickest and the fastest. The best example of how this works out in the world is, I was on vacation up in Northern Michigan, vacation in Michigan in the winter, that's an oxymoron, right? And I had to go to CVS Pharmacy to get my prescription because I had forgot them in my bags, caught up in that TSA packing and stuff and I just left them on the counter. And so I went to CVS, CVS was able to type in my stuff and bring up all my prescriptions, all my history, all my information, right there on the computer, they issued me the new prescription and then my pharmacist and my doctor back here saw that I had got an extra in my prescription while I was up in Northern Michigan and then they worked out my prescription when I got back. So our goal is to have every VSO, every VSR, RVSR, anywhere in the country to be able to look at any claim whenever they want. You should be able to pull up on your computer when we get to the final stage on this. Any veteran that you have responsibility for his or her claim, see the claim, see exactly what we're doing, see what the VSR, RVSR is doing, what they've done and what their decisions are and contact them if you want and find out what's going on with that claim. And more importantly, we'll get back to the DRO there. I really think this is going to give us the opportunity to break to the next level so that we'll be able to do claims a little bit fast, a little bit of higher quality. What I'm hoping is that this gives me the ability to remember at the beginning when I was talking about that quality where I could train my people, I want to be able to find out what at the DRO level in the appeals process, what decisions they're making. Because I believe, and this is all anecdotal, I don't have evidence yet, that the same guys are making the same mistakes in the same ROs. If I can figure out what those mistakes are and how to correct them, then I can direct training to them or send a team in and get them to correct it. One of the things I always say is, everybody says, why do you allow veterans to call you, to email you, to send you information? You're causing us all this extra work because you said, I get hundreds a day, literally. My buddies from my DAV chapters wow that big, because they send me most of them. But they come into me and then I give them to the smart people that work for me and they work them for us. And so when the supervisors come back and complain about, why are you allowing veterans to continue to do this? I said, I'll stop doing it when all the veterans are wrong. But so far they haven't been wrong. It's about 50-50. About half of the ones that come to me, we made a mistake. Somebody screwed up. We didn't look at the right piece of paper. We didn't advise the veteran properly. It's, you know, those little things. Now the nice thing is if they come through a VSO, especially DAV because of you guys' experience and training, and I've been to your training, you do a good job, there's less mistakes and you guys do a better job. And I think it's because you have the opportunity to sit one-on-one with that veteran across the table and you and him or her can have that conversation and work your way through it. We don't have that. We're looking at computers and data and stuff like that and it makes it a little bit tougher. So I think this will give us the opportunity to be able to do claims a little bit better for everybody throughout the country. Improving the veteran's experience. The secretary's number one plank in his platform for improving VA is improving the veteran experience. He says, you guys, I know you're the federal government. I know we're the federal government but you gotta act like a business. The customer is always right and you have to please the customer. The customer is your veteran. If the veteran isn't happy, if the veteran doesn't like what's going on inside of the process, then you're wrong. You have to improve the experience. What he's asked me to do, he said, okay, what do you think the worst part of the veteran experience is? That was easy. I used my experience. I said the compensation and pension exam. It was horrible. I didn't understand it. I didn't know why I was going. The doctor didn't tell me what was happening. I didn't know what he or she was measuring. I didn't know what the results meant. I didn't know how they tied it back to my claim. None of it made any sense. Well, we went out, we did a survey. Guess what? Still like that. Veterans don't understand the compensation and pension process. So we have a whole team right now working. How do we make that more veteran-centric? How do we call the veteran say, hey, we're scheduling you an exam in Roanoke. When are you available for exam? We don't do that right now. What doctor calls you up and says, hey, Captain Smith, you have an exam next Wednesday at nine o'clock. Be there or canceling your claim. Docs don't do that. Somebody from the office calls you up and says, hey, it's time for your exam. What days do you have available? That's the start. Instead of directing, talk to the veteran. They have jobs. They have lives. They can't stop everything to come in for a compensation and pension exam. So that's the first part. And then what's gonna happen when you get in there? I love those little commercials. Again, I'm gonna steal them all. Yeah. We need to have something like that to our veterans that says, here's a compensation and pension examination. Here's what you can expect. Here's what we're looking for. Here's what we're gonna measure. Here's what you should bring with you. Here's the kind of questions the doctor's gonna ask you. This is not a medical examination. We're not here to cure you. We're measuring stuff. Okay. And we should, for God's sakes, if we tell somebody to bring their records, their files, we should look at it. It shouldn't sit on it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so what to expect when you get there. And then when you get there, we have to educate our docs. Now, something that's happening this year that has never happened before in VA, for the first time in VA, compensation and pension is going to control all the exams. Okay. In the past, we had a huge contract with VHA, with the veterans health. And so their docs and the contract examiners working inside the VHA were doing all the exams. We now are running that contract outside of VBA. So we're setting the perimeters of the contract. We're telling the docs what they have to do, how they have to treat their customers, what their standards are to keep the contract, all those kinds of things. And we're sending inspectors out to make sure they're doing it from a compensation and pension perspective. It's not that they were doing it wrong before, but medical people running compensation and pension is different than compensation and pension people running compensation and pension because there's a specific outcome that we need from those examinations. Then it goes further than that. What's the office like when you get there? Is it clean? Is it comfortable? Did it was the doc respectable for you? Did the doc understand what your military service was? Did they look at all the information? Did we accept private medical evidence? It was supposed to accept private medical evidence. We're supposed to look at it. And then when you leave the follow-on, okay? Here's what's gonna happen now. Here's what's gonna happen with this paperwork. Here's how long you're gonna have to wait. Here's what the follow-up was gonna be and then let the people know what's happening. When I got done with my compensation and pension exam, and oh by the way, I got mine done by the military. I was telling somebody this this morning. I was still on active duty. I got everything done by the military. They did all the tests and everything. And then I went to the VA hospital and they did all the same tests over again. And that was the joint medical examination where they were doing one exam. But I did everything twice. What a waste for taxpayers. I mean, we had a shortage of medical people out there. It's hard for people to get appointments. Free up those doctors. You don't need to check something that's already been checked before. That's already done, guys. We gotta figure that out. And so I left my compensation exam and I went home and I waited and then six months later, still nothing. And I don't need the compensation. I'm retired from the Army. I'm working for the Department of Defense. But I'm curious. I wanna know. And so I keep beating up DAV who's my VSO. What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? Nine months later, I finally got a call on a Saturday and the call was, there's a big backlog. We'll get you when we can. 18 months later, I got another call. That's why I told him the VA sucked when I went to the VA. It was just. And it wasn't because it took so long to do my claim. It was because I didn't know. If somebody would have taken the time to tell me, hey, Danny, here's what's happening. We have a 600,000 claim backlog. We're gonna do the wounded combat vets that are coming back right now first. Then we're gonna do the people that are at risk of homelessness. Then we're gonna do the PTSD guys. Then we're gonna do, if they told me what they were doing, I would have bought it. And I would have been okay with it, but they didn't tell me anything. So the last part of this process is keeping people informed, telling them what's gonna happen, telling them what's happening with the process so at least they know. If people know what's gonna happen, they may not like it, but I think they feel a little bit better about it. Dependency claim processing. We have a nightmare in dependency claims. We have a contractor that's working for us right now that has knocked out a whole lot of dependency claims. We're at the limit of our legal authority on the contract because there's this thing about what's inherently governmental, what's not. I like the contractor because for a very little amount of money, it's incredibly cost effective. They can go through, they can make the calls, they can knock these out. We're trying to get permission to expand that right now to give us more legal authority because I think this is the right thing to do. The other thing that I'm trying to do, I think is the right thing to do is when somebody calls up and says, hey, I just got married, why can't I ask that person, okay, give me the date of the marriage. I need your spouse's name, his or her social security number, and the license number off the license. If you give me that, what do I care? Why don't I just approve it and start paying you for being married? Same thing if you have a kid. When you have a child now, you have to get a social security number. The IRS requires it. Okay, what's the date of birth? Give me the birth certificate number and give me the social security number of the child. We have a cross feed with the IRS. We have a cross feed with social security. We check, make sure it's not a duplicate that you're not scamming. That's pretty easy. And we just pay, and we should do, now I don't have the authority to do this, but we're trying. I believe that most veterans are honest. I believe that 99.99999 are veterans are not gonna be as you. They're gonna tell you the truth. They're gonna do the right thing because people generally do the right thing, especially veterans. They're people of their word. Why don't we just take them at their word, pay them for what we can pay them, and then at the end of the year, do the same thing the IRS does. Do a five or a 10% audit. Audit and go in and see if we made any mistakes. If somebody made a mistake, okay, got it. Captain Smith, you screwed up. You don't have 20 kids, you only have two. There shouldn't have been a zero on there. You know, we're gonna take this money away from you. Of course we would have never paid for 20, but we're gonna take this money away from you and you're not gonna get a check for a while or you owe us some back pay because you screwed up. If somebody commits fraud, prosecute them. Just like the IRS. If you purposely lie, if you purposely commit fraud, prosecute them, go after them. We do that already in the VA. If people commit, it doesn't happen very often. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't happen very often in the VA. But when a veteran does commit fraud, our investigators go after them or they use the federal investigators, they do whatever's necessary to take care of it. I think we need to get to the process where as a country, as an institution, we trust our veterans. We take them at their word. Dependency is so insignificant and it seems like such an easy thing. We shouldn't have a 200,000 person backlog in there. That's something we could knock out in a couple months and we're trying to work that pretty hard. The last couple of slides that I'm done, this is just the overall budget for the year. We're going through the budget hearings right now. Tomorrow is the Senate hearing. Last week was the Congressional hearing. Your representatives are going through the same hearings. They usually go before us in the budget process. We're all working through this together. The big thing in our budget right now is we're asking for more money for the appeals, more people for the appeals. They gave me 300 people in 15 and 16. I hired them early. I hired them in the middle of 15 so that we could train them up to say they'd be ready to go on 16. I'm gonna do the same thing this year. We have another batch that's coming in 17 and my intent is to hire them early too. Just use hire lag, because with a big organization, there's people coming and going all the time. So when we have vacancies, I'll hire more appeals people and try to get the appeals people out there. Problem with appeals is DROs are pretty specialized people. Not everybody can do that, so you just have to have the right person in there. This is our vision for the future. This is our way ahead. These are all the things we want to do. You can take a look at that later if you want. This is just more read. My eyes are so old, I can't read it and the page is right in front of me, so I don't know how you guys can read it back there, but it's a lot about where we're going for the future. It's a lot more automation, it's a lot more veteran-centric, taking care of the veterans. I love Secretary McDonald's pyramid where he's at the bottom and the veterans are at the top, where he turned the pyramid upside down. So instead of the hierarchical pyramid, we have all the veterans at the bottom and they gotta work their way up through the process to get to him. He turned it upside down. He calls it servant leadership. And we all learn that in the military. I mean, the first thing you learn in the military is that if you're the NCO or you're the officer, you get up first, you go to bed last, and you better be last in the chow hall. Now we gotta convince VA and other government bureaucracies that will take care of American citizens that that's the kind of leadership we need the government to. This is my last slide. No, you'll be glad to see me out of here. You can see our transformation. 80% down on the backlog. Quality is 98% in all but one category and that's at 97.5. Average days down to 91%. You know, guys, thank you very much. No BS and not pandering to the audience here. That 135,000, those fully developed claims, that's huge. That's a monster. That's an entire month's worth of work out of my entire organization that DAV did for us and they did it fully developed. That means it came to us ready to go, ready to move forward. That means those veterans are in the 91 days. That means they're taken care of and they're ready to move forward and people did the right things for them. Continue to tell people make sure you file online. Don't use paper. We'll be working with the appeals with the veteran service organizations just so you know your guys are taking the lead on that. They always have. The DAV pushes us pretty hard but that's okay. When I first came to VA, one of the things that concerned me was, oh wait a second, now instead of just Congress and the American people, now I got VSOs too. So I got three people I got an answer to instead of two over at DoD. It's gonna be a little bit tougher because I heard the VSOs are really vocal. Well you know what, they are vocal. And we meet on a regular basis. Your VSOs not only vocal, they're very tough on us. They're very hard on us. But you know what, you saw those slides up there. $90 billion a year in benefits and services. Somebody better be hard on us. That's a lot of the national treasure of the United States that's going out to the veterans of this country for their service to this nation. It needs to be done right. It needs to be done fairly. It needs to be done fast. It needs to be done accurately. And for that I appreciate the pressure that I get from the VSOs. Even though it's not fun at the time that I'm getting the pressure. But thanks again. I got a couple minutes for a few questions.