HomeVeterans Guide to VA BenefitsVA Benefits-Filing a Claim/Refer to Veterans Guide to VA Claim FilingHow to Communicate with the VA

13.1. How to Communicate with the VA

VA is the second largest agency in the federal government. With over 250,000 employees in hundreds of facilities, just figuring out who in VA you need to contact and how to reach him or her can be difficult. Another problem is that even with recent updates, VA remains a paper-driven – and paper-choked – organization. As a result, getting the right piece of paper to the right person is not easy.

In fact there is no way for anyone outside VA to guarantee that any communication to VA ever reaches anyone or, if it does, it is acted upon. VETSFIRST can only offer the following suggestions and good practices that have been shown to improve the chances that your communication to VA is successful.

The best place to look for the correct address to send a letter to VA is the letter or other document to which you are responding. You should always carefully read all parts of every VA letter sent to you because VA sometimes instructs you to reply to a different address than on the letterhead (and often buries deadlines for responses in the fine print at the end of letters). If no special address is identified, a response to the address on the letterhead is usually acceptable. If all else fails, most VA mailing addresses are available on the VA website.

VA has established some electronic communications tools, including the Inquiry Routing & Information System ("IRIS"), https://iris.custhelp.com/ and the infamous "800 number." While these tools can be helpful on rare occasions, experience has shown that the accuracy and quality of the responses and information returned by these sites can vary widely. VA is notoriously slow to update status information in its various computer systems. Further, the person responding to inquiries is unlikely to be in the same state, much less the same office, as where your claim is being worked. It is also risky to rely on these systems as there is no accountability and no realistic way of confirming the accuracy of the information that is reported.

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