Veterans are deeply concerned about the VA's claims backlog. In March of 2013, there were over 896,000 claims in the inventory; of that number, more than 632,000 or 70 percent were backlogged or pending longer than VA's goal of 125 days. As of December of 2013, those numbers look very different. The number of claims pending longer than 125 days, or officially part of the backlog, has dropped to just over 395,000 claims or 57 percent of the total inventory. The origin of this problem goes back a number of years. Until 2008 there was no serious effort on the part of VA to move from the world of...

There are 22 million veterans in the United States. The VA provides 6.5 million veterans a year with health care. The VA has got to be accountable. It has also got to be efficient. We have also got to ascertain what the problems facing the veterans community and their families are and do everything we can to make sure that the VA is on the kind of position that it needs to be to address those problems. Of the 2 million men and women who served our country, put their lives on the line in Afghanistan and Iraq, studies suggest that 20 to 30 percent have come home with PTSD or TBI. Simply stated,...

When men and women go off to war they are not going to get ripped off at home, not by financial institutions and not by people trying to take advantage of benefits which they have earned. People go off to war, families are left with kids, they are struggling back home, they are vulnerable, and we are not going to allow those people to be taken advantage of. Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) have occurred within the mortgage lending industry within the past few years. In a 2012 report, the GAO identified over 14,000 instances of financial institutions failing to properly...