WASHINGTON – Randy Leger Diaz said his whole body was in pain after serving in the Marines.
Following rigorous physical training in the mornings, Leger said, he spent his days working in a warehouse while stationed with the 7th Communication Battalion at Camp Hansen on Okinawa, Japan, beginning in 2014. After returning stateside, Leger was transferred to Parris Island, in South Carolina, where he started as a recruit and finished his service in 2017.
The labor took a toll. After returning to civilian life, Leger said, his knees would pop and lock, and sharp pains shot up and down his legs. His back, wrist and shoulders ached. He couldn’t sleep, and he had stomach problems, among other ailments.
“They always tell us in the Marines to suck it up,” he said. That worked in his 20s. But when he reached his 30s, he said, his injuries started to affect his ability to work.
The Department of Veterans Affairs runs one of the federal government’s largest disability programs, providing compensation and treatment for millions of veterans for injuries or conditions connected to or worsened by their time in uniform.
Leger first filed for benefits in November 2024. The VA denied him monthly compensation for most of his conditions.
The former Marine said his attorney requested a higher-level review, in which a more senior VA employee reassesses a decision using the same evidence used in the initial round.
After the review, the VA told him that on most of the conditions for which he filed a claim, it committed errors collecting medical evidence. Leger eventually received monthly compensation for some of his rejected claims, he said.
Leger’s experience has become more common as the VA has increasingly used automation to gather veterans’ records ahead of claims determinations.
An investigation by the Washington Bureau of The Beam, an accountability newsroom at Arizona State University’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, found that the VA’s increasing use of automation coincided with a large surge in errors in the collection of medical evidence needed to process veterans’ claims.
The errors have meant that human reviewers are making benefit determinations without proper evidence more often, causing wrongful delays or denials of compensation.
“Premature or erroneous denials lead to more appeals where timelines are measured in years and not months,” Rep. Mark Takano of California, the senior Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in an April 2026 hearing. “Any delay in getting a veteran their earned benefits is a problem. It can lead to the denial of health care and needless suffering.”
The findings are based on analysis of VA-published data, interviews with veterans’ lawyers, congressional testimony from veterans service organizations, complaints to the House committee that oversees the VA, an inspector general’s report, reviews of regional VA offices by The American Legion, and documents obtained from the Board of Veterans’ Appeals.
Since the VA began using the automated tool nearly five years ago, higher-level reviews have been sending back a growing share of decisions for reconsideration. This can be because of a disagreement with the decision, or a finding that the initial review was made in error because not all necessary evidence was gathered.
The VA introduced Automated Decision Support in December 2021. The tool is designed to collect medical records, including those from a veteran’s time in the military, determine if a claim is ready for review or if an extra medical exam is needed, and write a summary to help the claims rater, the VA employee who decides how much compensation a veteran is entitled to.
The VA denies that automation contributes to errors and instead, says the tool speeds up processing. Employees have aired complaints about it to Congress and to veterans advocacy groups, asserting the tool routinely fails to extract key details from documents and misunderstands medical nuances.
“There is no evidence to suggest the Automated Decision Support tool is causing errors,” VA press secretary Quinn Slaven told The Beam by email.
The department has long struggled with extended wait times and backlogs of unprocessed claims. At an April 15, 2026, congressional hearing, a top VA official testified that the increasing use of technology has streamlined processing, allowing the VA to drastically reduce backlogs and set records in the past two years for the number of claims processed.
Margarita Devlin, the VA’s principal deputy under secretary for benefits, told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that the number of mistakes in claims processing was decreasing and accuracy rates were improving.
“Our errors, in general, are decreasing and our percentage of accuracy has been going up,” she testified under questioning by Takano.
However, reports on errors identified in veterans’ appeals – which the VA publishes monthly as required under a 2017 law aimed at modernizing its appeals process – show that errors have surged in the past five years, coinciding with the expanded use of Automated Decision Support.
In fiscal year 2021, the VA counted more than 66,000 errors in collecting evidence for veterans’ claims. The number has climbed in each subsequent year. In fiscal year 2026, the tally was over 329,000.
“Veterans need, want, and deserve timely and accurate decisions on their claims,” Takano told The Beam in an emailed statement. “A quick decision is well and good. But if we’re moving so quickly that errors are made, or if we’re simply rushing to denials, veterans are not being served well.”
More automation, more errors
In fiscal year 2021, just before the launch of Automated Decision Support, higher-level reviewers sent back about 23% of claims decisions to collect more evidence and reconsider. Five years later, in fiscal year 2026, that rate hit 35%.
The VA tracks outcomes of higher-level reviews and publishes the statistics as required under the 2017 Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act.
In this popular appeal route, senior VA reviewers examine existing evidence in a veteran’s claim, and they can send the cases for reprocessing if they disagree with the original finding or identify an error in collection of medical evidence.
Evidence collection errors can stem from either automated or human mistakes. The statistics the VA publishes make no distinction between the two.
Either way, the VA is mandated by law to help veterans obtain evidence needed to substantiate their claims.
The Automated Decision Support tool does not decide how much compensation a veteran is entitled to. And it is used only on certain conditions.
The initial rollout focused on hypertension cases in the VA’s office in Boise, Idaho. The VA has since expanded the tool to other regional offices and more conditions.
When a veteran submits a claim for one of the conditions approved for automated processing, the tool collects medical records from the VA and the applicant’s time in service, scans the files for keywords and data points, and writes a summary.
Before the file reaches a human who ultimately determines benefit amounts, Automated Decision Support analyzes the records and decides if the claim is ready for review. If it determines there is not enough evidence, the tool orders an additional examination to help a veteran support their claim.
Human raters use the ADS-generated summary as a reference when deciding the severity of the injury, the degree to which it stems from military service and the monthly compensation to which the veteran is entitled – otherwise known as the claim rating.
In 2023, the VA completed nearly 300,000 decisions on claims using Automated Decision Support, according to VA budget documents. By April 2026, the tool was taking action on claims at a pace of more than 50,000 times per month. The VA plans to apply the tool to 90% of all claims by the end of 2027, according to its latest annual budget request.
The VA’s inspector general found during the tool’s pilot program that Automated Decision Support routinely produced summary sheets that were inaccurate and missed key details, according to a report issued in September 2023.
If a claim is sent to review without a necessary exam, that is a “duty-to-assist” error – a lapse in the VA’s obligation under federal law to help veterans obtain the evidence needed to support their claims.
Not all of these errors can be attributed to automation. The VA does not publish error rates specifically for claims processed with the support tool or publicly separate the tool’s mistakes from those made by employees.
Such errors are tracked only when a veteran appeals a claim decision. Many do not, so the scale of the problem could be much higher than the reported error count indicates.
The VA’s defense: More veterans are appealing
Slaven, the VA press secretary, attributed the spike in identified errors to the fact that the number of denials appealed under the higher-level review process quadrupled from 2020 to 2026. That, he said, “is why more errors are being found at this stage of the process.”
The Beam presented Slaven with data showing that the share of higher-level reviews that send cases back to be reconsidered rose along with the total number of errors. Slaven did not address those statistics in a response to detailed questions.
At the April 2026 House hearing, Devlin testified that accuracy rates have improved.
She referenced a metric called issue-based accuracy, which measures how often the VA makes the right decision about each separate medical condition in a veteran’s larger disability claim. The measurement consistently produces higher accuracy rates than a second way the VA is required to publicly report, which examines how often the VA makes an error in processing any part of a claim.
“Respectfully, sir, they’re higher than they’ve been in two years at 94%,” Devlin said about the accuracy rates, referring to the method that produces higher accuracy rates while responding to questions from Takano.
The VA did not make Devlin available for an interview after repeated requests and did not respond to questions about how to reconcile her testimony with the higher-level review error rates it reports publicly.
A Democratic aide on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee acknowledged that the number of appeals has gone up but emphasized that the “number of errors found in Higher Level Reviews or caught by the Board of Veterans’ Appeals are also increasing.”
“That speaks to a quality deficit” at the Veterans Benefits Administration, the VA subagency that handles benefits, the staffer said by email. “That can be directly attributed to the errors produced by ADS.”
Attorney John Niles, who specializes in veterans appeals, agreed.
“There can be no doubt that VA’s expanding reliance on Automated Decision Support is a contributing cause of duty-to-assist errors,” Niles said by email. “Within VA’s claims system, overlooking even a seemingly minor detail when automating can bring harm to thousands of veterans and their loved ones.”
The American Legion, which describes itself as the largest U.S. veterans organization, with over 1.6 million members, conducted reviews in 2025 at VA regional offices in Chicago, Puerto Rico and Louisville, Kentucky. Employees at those offices reported the automated tool frequently misses details and fails to extract critical evidence from documents, according to the reports.
ADS “systems are not designed to manage the legal complexity or evidentiary nuance required in most claims,” the report from Louisville said.
The reviews described parallel problems at each regional office. Though the tool recognizes common terms like “lower back” or “hypertension,” it can miss secondary conditions like neuropathy or muscle disorders, according to the report from San Juan. That report and the one from Chicago said the tool can struggle to read handwritten notes, among other issues.
The “limitation frequently results in partial rather than complete claims being submitted,” the San Juan report reads, which “delays and contributes to the underdevelopment of claims.”
“Whether caused by automated or human error, The American Legion is always concerned about how an incorrect decision can adversely impact veterans and families navigating the claims process,” William L. Call Jr., national director of The American Legion Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Commission, said in an emailed statement.
The Democratic aide said the veterans committee has received “a myriad” of similar complaints from VA employees.
“We hear from claims processors that the ADS system often produces incomplete or incorrect information,” the staffer said by email. “ADS often mislabels medical evidence or misses it entirely, and it often fails in applying the proper statutes and regulations.”
What judges reviewing veterans’ appeals are concluding
The Board of Veterans’ Appeals is the highest level of appeal on claims. The board publishes documents explaining the decisions by its veterans law judges, who by law must be attorneys.
In one 2024 case, the VA proposed to cut off a veteran’s disability compensation for bilateral hearing loss. The veteran contested the proposal, and the regional office reviewed the case and found that an automated system had failed to identify relevant evidence in the veteran’s record.
The veteran filed an appeal, submitted private medical records and underwent a fresh VA hearing exam. Instead of eliminating his disability benefits, the VA raised his monthly compensation.
In a 2025 case, the review board found “significant discrepancies” between an automated summary and a veteran’s actual service treatment records. The VA had denied a claim for service-related asthma without providing an asthma exam. The appeals judge deemed that the VA committed a duty-to-assist error and sent the claim back to be reconsidered.
Leger, the former Marine, posted screenshots on Reddit showing the VA informing him of “duty-to-assist” mistakes on his claims.
“I don’t even know whether to laugh or be angry anymore,” he posted on the VAClaims subreddit on Jan. 7, 2026.
“Basically every single issue they previously denied or mishandled now magically has an error attached to it,” he wrote. “I’m glad the errors were identified, but it’s hard not to feel like the VA just wasted years of my life by not doing basic development the first time around.”
Others posted in the thread, sharing similar experiences. “What’s up with all these DTA (duty-to-assist) lately jeez,” one user replied.