A bottleneck at the National Archives is delaying benefits claims for 32,000 military veterans, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The Covid-19 pandemic shut the National Personnel Records Center, a unit of the Archives, for months last year except for emergency requests. After briefly operating at low capacity, it once again closed in the fall for all but emergency requests.
A veteran’s record may need certification by the Archives as one of the first steps in the benefits process. Veterans who left the service after 2000 likely have digitized records that can be more easily accessed for certification purposes, but many older veterans’ records are kept in old-fashioned paper archives. When one of those veterans makes a claim, the center’s archivists have to retrieve those records by hand from among the 60 million maintained at the facility in St. Louis.
VA Secretary Robert Wilkie doesn’t have the ability to bypass the certification requirements, but he is currently working with the national archivist to develop a new, expedited protocol, said Christina Noel, a VA spokeswoman.
“We are operating with reduced on-site staff due to the pandemic, but we never completely closed,” the Archives’ public affairs team said in a statement. The Archives has serviced 90,000 emergency requests during the pandemic and 125,000 requests from the VA, which is able to give priority to requests. Officials expect the remaining backlog to be addressed by March, according to the statement.
