Have workers for months or even years destroyed untold numbers of documents critical in deciding if the Veterans Administration (VA) owes a valiant military veteran a pension or a disability payment?

"That's the obvious question," says Mike Walcoff, the VA's deputy undersecretary for benefits in Washington. "We can't answer that at this point."

Last week, the VA's 56 regional offices began investigating allegations of improperly shredded documents, after the agency's Inspector General found problems in four cities — St. Petersburg, St. Louis, Detroit, and Waco, Texas.

Of the eight documents found shredded in St. Petersburg, the VA said seven would have been critical in deciding a veteran's claim. The eighth document had already been processed, but should have been returned to the veteran, rather than being marked for shredding.

"This is not something we're comfortable with," Walcoff said. "I won't say anything to diminish the importance of the documents veterans send us. We didn't take care of some of them like we should."

The St. Petersburg benefits office, covering the entire state of Florida and its 1.8-million veterans, processed over 60,000 pension or disability claims just last year.

As the VA and Inspector General now continue their shredding investigations, the VA is now extending a national ban on all shredding, in all of its benefits offices, until a policy is finally established to safeguard these documents.

So far, 489 documents critical to veterans' claims have been found in VA shredder bins across the country.  "Critical" means that the document was necessary for the veteran's claim to be properly adjudicated by the VA.

Joe Davis, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said he is worried that findings of improperly discarded veteran papers point to a much bigger problem.

"This could go back many years," Davis said. "It's all about attention to detail. VA employees have to remember that the signature on a claims form belongs to a real human being. It's not just a piece of paper."

So far, the VA doesn't know how these 489 documents made their way to the shredding bins, or who is responsible. And neither can the VA say if these documents were dumped by accident, or on purpose.

Walcoff also noted that the VA's benefits offices are among the most paper-intensive bureaucracies in the federal government, processing 162-million pages of paper throughout the nation.

And while the VA is now finally moving to electronic records, Walcoff said, the transition is far from complete.

"This just screams out at us to move faster, so we get to the point where we're not dealing with all that paper."

Lost or misplaced documents are one of the most common complaints by our veterans, who often have to wait years for the VA to decide if they are owed a pension or a disability payment.

And for our veterans, it is usually impossible to prove that the VA lost their submitted paperwork. So, they are often forced to send many new copies, greatly delaying their claims.

"Until now, all we had was a veteran's statement" that something was lost, Walcoff said. "When we hear those types of comments now, we're certainly going to listen to them in a different light, based on what's happened in the last couple of weeks."

A Congressional Hearing on ‘Shredding of Veteran Documents’ will be held the week of November 17^th.

And for years now, many veteran advocates have been saying that the VA needed to hire many additional claims processors to handle its enormous workload.  And for years now, far too many of our leaders have been extremely reluctant to expand VA’s budget to accomplish this.

Never, ever, send the VA an original document – always send them a copy – and make plenty of extra copies for yourself.

It seems the problems of our valiant veterans – never end.