I want to show you numbers the VA publishes about itself.

Not numbers from a law firm's marketing page. Numbers from the Board of Veterans' Appeals annual report to Congress, from the VA Office of Inspector General, and from the Government Accountability Office. They describe a system in which a veteran can do everything right, have a legitimate disability, submit real evidence, and still be denied.

If that has happened to you, you were not imagining it, and it was probably not your fault.

Start with the Board's own scorecard

In fiscal year 2024 the Board of Veterans' Appeals dispatched 116,192 appeals. Here is how they came out.

Under the modern AMA system: 38.4 percent allowed, 28.4 percent remanded, 17.0 percent denied, and 16.2 percent resolved some other way. Under the older legacy system: 35.2 percent allowed, 44.0 percent remanded, 16.4 percent denied, 4.4 percent other.

Sit with the first two figures in each row. Roughly a third of appeals were outright granted. Another quarter to nearly half were remanded, which means a judge looked at what the regional office did and sent it back because the work was not finished.

Add those together. In the legacy system, close to eight in ten appeals ended in something other than a clean denial. These are not frivolous cases being weeded out. These are decisions the regional office got wrong, or got wrong enough that a judge would not sign off on them.

Then look at what happens above the Board

The Board is not the last stop. A veteran can appeal a Board decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, a federal court outside VA, within 120 days under 38 U.S.C. 7266.

In November 2023, the GAO reported that over a three-year period, the Court remanded about 80 percent of the Board decisions that came before it, frequently because the Board had not adequately explained itself.

Read that again. Of the Board decisions that got appealed to a federal court, roughly four out of five were sent back.

The same GAO report found the Board had no written policies or procedures for calculating its own accuracy rate, that it had lost data, and that GAO could not verify the accuracy rates the Board itself reported in two of the four fiscal years examined.

The error rates inside specific claim types

This is where it stops being abstract.

Unemployability claims. In July 2024 the VA Inspector General published a review of Total Disability based on Individual Unemployability decisions. It found that 74 percent of granted TDIU claims and 76 percent of denied TDIU claims contained processing errors, producing at least $100 million in improper payments over a single twelve-month period. The OIG attributed it to inadequate system controls, inconsistent interpretation of procedures by staff, and limited exposure to unemployability claims among the people deciding them.

Three out of four. On the benefit that pays at the 100 percent rate.

Military sexual trauma claims. In July 2025 the Inspector General found that accuracy on MST claims had fallen almost ten percentage points between fiscal years 2019 and 2024, below VBA's own 96 percent target. More striking: about 34 percent of denied MST claims still contained errors after a designated reviewer had already approved them. The errors named were failing to obtain all the records, insufficient medical opinions because evidence was missed, and not ordering examinations that should have been ordered.

A second set of eyes reviewed those denials and a third of them were still wrong.

One employee in Philadelphia. In September 2025 the Inspector General reported that a single senior veterans service representative at the Philadelphia Regional Office had approved roughly 85,300 claims across fiscal years 2022 through 2024 — 19 times the national average. Reviewing a sample of the roughly 15,600 decisions that employee approved from January through June 2024, the OIG estimated that 84 percent contained at least one error.

PACT Act claims. Also in September 2025, the OIG found processors failing to correctly identify toxic exposure claims, failing to verify exposure, failing to request medical exams and opinions when the file called for them, and issuing decisions with incomplete or missing information. Guidance, the OIG noted, was scattered across multiple sources and changed frequently.

And then there is the examination

You know the appointment. Twenty or thirty minutes with a stranger who has your file open on a laptop.

In fiscal year 2024, contractors — not VA clinicians — conducted over three million disability examinations at a cost of more than $5 billion, roughly 93 percent of all VA disability exams. That is from GAO's August 2025 report.

The same report found that VA's Special Focused Reviews, the quality reviews meant to check examinations for the hardest claim types, were overdue by nine months as of July 2025, or had not been scheduled at all. The claim types waiting on those reviews were traumatic brain injury, military sexual trauma, and Gulf War Illness.

The three hardest, most easily misunderstood categories of claim a veteran can file, and the quality checks on those exams were behind or missing.

GAO also noted that five of the six examiners it interviewed said they would rather report quality concerns directly to VA than route them through the contractor that employs them.

The thorough list: why good claims still get denied

Here is the honest inventory. Any one of these can sink a claim that deserved to be granted.

Things that go wrong at the examination:

• The examiner has twenty minutes, a production quota, and a file they skimmed rather than read.
• The examiner is a contractor with no relationship to you and no follow-up obligation.
• The examiner never served, and does not know what a fifty-pound ruck for eight years does to a spine, what a flight line does to hearing, or why you would not have gone to sick call.
• The examiner records range of motion on a good day and the report becomes your permanent baseline.
• The examiner writes a boilerplate negative opinion with no reasoning, and a rater relies on it anyway.
• The examiner asks about your worst symptoms and you say you are fine, because that is what you were trained to say.
• The exam was never ordered at all — a documented, repeated failure in the OIG's MST and PACT Act reviews.

Things that go wrong at the regional office:

• The rater is working a production target and your file is one of a great many that week.
• The rater applies the wrong diagnostic criteria, or rates the wrong condition.
• The rater never obtains private records you identified, so the strongest evidence is simply absent.
• The rater does not consider a theory you did not name explicitly, such as aggravation or secondary service connection.
• The rater misapplies the combined ratings math under 38 CFR 4.25.
• The rater assigns an effective date that ignores an intent to file.
• The decision does not explain its reasoning, which is the single most common reason the Court sends Board decisions back.
• Guidance changed and the processor was working from an older version.

Things that go wrong with the evidence:

• There is no nexus opinion, because no one told you the claim needed a doctor to put the link in writing.
• The service treatment records are silent, because you walked it off in 1994.
• The records were destroyed, scattered across Guard and Reserve components, or never digitized.
• Your own statement described a diagnosis instead of describing function.
• Nobody obtained buddy statements from the people who watched it happen.

Things that go wrong because of who we are:

• You minimized. Every veteran does it. It is the most expensive habit in this entire process.
• You did not file for years because other people had it worse.
• You never deployed, so you decided you did not deserve to claim anything.
• You missed the one-year deadline because opening that envelope again was more than you had that month.
• You accepted the first answer, because a denial from the government reads like a verdict rather than a first draft.

Notice how many of those have nothing to do with whether you are actually disabled.

Does representation change anything? Here is the data, honestly.

The Board's FY2024 annual report breaks its legacy-system decisions out by who represented the veteran. These are the government's numbers, not mine.

• Attorney: 42.7 percent allowed, 12.7 percent denied, out of 14,500
• American Legion: 32.0 percent allowed, 15.2 percent denied
• Disabled American Veterans: 31.7 percent allowed, 18.8 percent denied
• State service organizations: 31.5 percent allowed, 18.8 percent denied
• No representation: 29.7 percent allowed, 21.2 percent denied

Attorney-represented appeals were allowed at 42.7 percent against 29.7 percent for unrepresented ones, and the outright denial rate for attorney-represented appeals was 12.7 percent against 21.2 percent with no representation.

Now the part most law firms leave out.

Those figures show a correlation. They do not prove that hiring a lawyer caused those outcomes, and I am not going to tell you they do.

Attorneys choose their cases and decline others, so the cases we bring are not a random sample. Attorneys usually come in after an initial decision, when the record already looks different. Some veterans hire counsel precisely because their case is complicated, and others never need to. Any one of those could explain part of the gap.

What I can tell you is what representation actually does, which is more useful than a percentage. It reads the C-file. It identifies which of the three elements the decision actually turned on. It picks the correct review lane instead of guessing. It calendars the deadline. It goes and gets the nexus opinion nobody obtained. It reads the examination report for the errors the OIG keeps finding. And it does not accept a decision that fails to explain itself, because a federal court sends about 80 percent of those back.

None of that is a guarantee. Nobody honest will give you one.

What to take from all of this

A denial is a first draft, written under production pressure, by a person who may never have worn the uniform, relying on an examination that lasted twenty minutes and was performed by a contractor whose quality reviews are running nine months behind.

That is not cynicism. Every sentence of it comes from VA's own Inspector General, from GAO, and from the Board's report to Congress.

So: read the decision, find the reason, get the evidence that answers it, and file inside the one-year window. Do not treat the first answer as the last one. The system's own numbers say it very often is not.

The Jacks Law Group represents veterans nationwide and worldwide from offices in Henderson and Las Vegas, Nevada. David R. Jacks, Jr. is a VA-accredited attorney and a 100% permanently and totally disabled U.S. Army veteran. If you want help with a claim or an appeal, call to schedule a consultation.

Disclaimer: This blog is for general information only. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every VA claim turns on its own facts, and rates, rating criteria and program rules change over time. Statistics cited are from published government reports as of the date of writing and describe past agency-wide results; they are not a prediction about any individual claim and no outcome is promised. For advice about your own situation, speak with a VA-accredited attorney.

Sources: Board of Veterans' Appeals Chairman's Annual Report, FY2024; GAO-24-106156 (Nov. 29, 2023); GAO-25-107483 (Aug. 18, 2025); VA Office of Inspector General Report 23-01772-162 (July 17, 2024); VA Office of Inspector General Report 24-01429-145 (July 30, 2025); VA Office of Inspector General reports on the Philadelphia Regional Office and PACT Act claims processing (September 2025).