I'll start off and then I'll ask Rick Christopher, who commands, to use that term.... He is the director of our central operations division. He basically has a battalion's worth of adjudicators under his command moving this forward. There are a number of veterans as part of his organization.
I gave a speech about this in Toronto the other night at the Royal Canadian Military Institute. As I tell the story of where we were in 2014-15 when I arrived, we had a bit of a perfect storm. We had the troops coming home from Afghanistan. We still had troops releasing from Bosnia and Kosovo and from other missions like Rwanda, Somalia and so on. For the first time, we really saw the social understanding of mental health injuries. For the first time, people who had been reluctant to come forward because of stigma started to come forward. It was not only Afghan veterans, but World War II veterans coming in for the first time. At the same time, the department was reduced in the order of 35% to 40%, depending on where you were in budget and people. All of these young folks were coming out of the military and at the same time the shortcomings of the new veterans charter were recognized by the ombudsman and others. That's why we had kind of a perfect storm. The applications started coming in faster and faster.
I still remember when I started that we would get in the order of about 35,000 claims a year. We're north of 60,000 claims now. Back in 2015, Rick Christopher's folks would try to get at least 2,500 decisions a month. We're north of 5,000 decisions a month. We used to produce out the door about $5 million a day in disability claims. We're in the order of $10 million to $15 million a day in disability claims. I say that to give you an understanding of the volume we're dealing with.