VA Compensation Roadblock   By William H. McMichael Air Force Times   A painstaking adjudication process, complex payment history recalculations and a staffing shortfall are to blame for the backlog of 37,000 claims for two veterans’ disability compensation programs, defense officials said.   In addition, the workload grew significantly after September 2006, when officials determined how to comply with a 2004 congressional mandate to phase out offsets to military retired pay associated with disability compensation payments from the Department of Veterans Affairs – to the tune of nearly 79,000 additional cases.   The Defense Finance and Accounting Service is focusing on the original claims—a total of 133,057 had been submitted by September 2006—and hopes to have the remaining 37,211 resolved by April, DFAS spokesman Thomas LaRock said.   The original backlog in the two programs, Concurrent Retirement and Disability Payment and Combat-Related Special Compensation, drew the ire of Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who blasted defense officials at a recent hearing on the Pentagon’s 2009 budget request.   Pentagon Comptroller Tina Jonas, who oversees DFAS, told Wyden she had recently been made aware of the problem and had ordered the number of people working on the effort to be tripled.   But the manpower shortage was only one roadblock to clearing out the backlog, LaRock said.  Some records had never been digitized, forcing manual entry of data.   DFAS also did not have the already-digitized data captured in a software program that would allow for relatively quick recalculations of the payments due.   Of the 133,057 cases identified by September 2006, 118,115 cases are related to CRSC and 16,297 to CRDP; in 30,583 cases, the payments are a combination of CRSC and CRDP, LaRock said.   The Concurrent Retirement and Disability Payment program is phasing out a law enacted more than a century ago that required disabled military retirees to forfeit a dollar of military retired pay for every dollar received in veterans disability compensation.   Combat-Related Special Compensation is a separate program under which a special, nontaxable payment replaces the entire retired-pay offset for retirees with any VA-related disability that is the direct result of combat or combat-like training.   [ Compensation News ]