The Department of Veterans Affairs has been swamped with claims, the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide in Sydney has been told.
Three senior public servants were grilled on Friday about the hurdles veterans faced when seeking support from the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA).
On Monday when the second round of hearings began, the commission heard the DVA had 56,663 claims on hand as of June, 30 2021 — more than double the 25,496 from June, 30 2019.
It was later told that processing times had blown out to an average of 200 days for non-urgent claims.
And on Friday the department's deputy secretary Vicki Rundle admitted they were swamped with claims.
Ms Rundle was repeatedly asked if it was due to poor planning or a lack of resources.
"The experience has been that claims have still exceeded our capacity to process them, so it was greater than we had anticipated," she said.
Counsel assisting Peter Gray then asked: "So you are saying that, in hindsight, the forecasting is inaccurate and actual volumes of claims exceeded the forecasts?"
"Well, I don't think I can say it was inaccurate at the time," Ms Rundle responded.
Mr Gray then tried to pinpoint what had led to such a blowout in the volume of claims and processing time.
"What we have here is quite concerning evidence of a steeply increasing backlog and its been going on for some years," he said.
"That increase suggests that something has gone wrong.
"The options appear to be that either the forecasting was wrong over that period, leading to inadequate requests for resources, or that government didn't provide the resources that were requested."
Deputy secretary Traci-Ann Byrnes told the commission that in the lead-up to claims increasing, the DVA's staffing level had declined.
In 2015, it had a workforce of 1,935 but that dropped to 1,615 by 2020.
Ms Rundle voiced her concern over the presumption of a direct link between claims processing and death by suicide.
"One taking one's death by suicide is multi-causal and is much more complex than one causal factor," she said.
Although she did concede when pressed on the issue that it was "possible" that slow claims processing raised the risk of death by suicide.
"It may be claims delay, maybe a causal factor, one of the causal factors," she said.
This week the royal commission heard from nine witnesses with lived experience, including family members of former Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel who had taken their life.
The widow of an Afghanistan veteran told of how the army failed to help when she was subjected to domestic violence.
And how after her husband's death, it took seven months for her young sons to access grief counselling.
The mother of another Afghanistan veteran told the hearing it took six years for her son to access a gold card which was needed for vital surgeries to address combat injuries and psychological treatment.
The DVA's claims processing is the subject of a $1.3 million review by consulting group McKinsey & Co.
While the report has been completed and was given to the government in December last year, it has not been made public.
In closing this week's hearings, Counsel Assisting Kevin Connor said: "There is evidence of possible sub-standard processes. There's also significant issues about access to effective care and quality care."
