I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to go paperless for disability claims.

On the one hand, millions of pieces of paper (multiple pages for each and every claim) are hard to track, and the VA isn’t always good at it. Remember the tales of mail being ditched or shredded?

On the other hand, it’s far too easy to blame missing documents on computers. “It never got here,” is always a handy excuse.

The VA hasn’t had a good track record of taking things online either. Look at the $127 million it spent on an appointment scheduling system. Then it had to start over.

But we still hear about cases of rigging the appointments. It’s called “gaming,” and employees are doing it so their performance looks better. All it takes is one (or dozens) of wayward employees to make changes in the data. There are cases of clerks canceling appointments moments before the veteran arrives, or changing the date the appointment was initially made to make it look like the veteran is getting a fast appointment, and more.

Still, the VA is going to try to get it right this time, and it’s awarded a $9.1 million contract to IBM for a fully automated online-claims processing system. To his credit, VA chief Eric Shinseki wants to start small. Initial claims will be limited to Vietnam veterans with the following illnesses: B-cell leukemia, Parkinson’s disease or ischemic heart disease.

At this point, those three haven’t been completely cleared for presumptive service related disability, but that’s supposed to happen later this year.

The new claims system is slated to be ready in November.

The hope is that this will allow claims decisions in 125 days.

(c) 2010 King Features Synd., Inc.