Duty First Consulting (DFC) has been awarded two contracts to support the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) in improving benefits delivery to Veterans and their families. VA is facing the prospect of a significant increase in disability compensation claims due to legislation increasing benefits eligibility for Veterans exposed to toxic substances. To respond to the surge of anticipated claims, VBA Office of Automated Benefits Delivery (ABD) is developing several major programs aimed at a progressive transformation of disability compensation benefits delivery. Initiatives range in size and complexity to improve manually intensive processes through the use of automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and rules-based processing.

With the rapid pace of development and new projects within ABD, DFC was awarded the first contract to support quality assessments and independent validation and verification (IV&V) of ABD’s deployed automation efforts and to gather user feedback data to assist ABD moving forward. With the second contract award, DFC is providing services to perform data analysis and business process optimization to validate current processes and to identify future automation efforts.