Whether it's Veterans Affairs and this program or it's any other program, performance measures are important to understand whether the intended outcomes, the results of a program, are being achieved or not. Having a way of knowing whether the program is doing what it's supposed to be doing is very important.
One of the issues in this audit, in particular though, about performance measures is that they had a performance measure in place around processing the application, how long it took to process the application. They were pretty close to meeting that target, but it was only measuring one part of the process. It wasn't measuring all of these other parts, including the appeal or how long it takes to fill out an application.
Matching up performance measures with the entire intended outcome of a program is not easy to do, but that is really what performance measures need to do. It's whether the program is achieving what it's supposed to be achieving. It is good to measure individual activities, but those individual activities need to somehow get into an overall measure of whether the program is achieving what it's intended to achieve.