I'm going to try to provide an explanation, Madam Chair. I'm just not sure if it's going to be a good one. You'll have to judge.
The reason is that we brought the board up to a full contingent, if you will. When we took office a little over three years ago, we had many vacancies within the board.
I know, Ron, that you or Suzanne will know the numbers, but I believe that about half the board was vacant.
One of the reasons we moved on this was simply because if you don't have a full contingent on the board these appeals get held up. When we took office, we had a backlog of about 7,000 Veterans Affairs appeals before the board--7,000--so for obvious reasons we said, “Let's get the board up to a full contingent and get it up and running.”
That's one of the reasons why you'll see a spike in the numbers there. We brought the board up to a full contingent. As a result of that, we have cut the number of appeal cases from a backlog of about 7,000 down to around 3,000.
Am I correct in that?