Thank you, Mr. Casey.
Good evening, everyone.
You're correct—we are conducting a multi-year, multi-jurisdictional review of the table of disabilities. We started that a couple of years ago, and we anticipate having it completed at the end of this fiscal year, so by March 2024. Part of that review involves consulting with our Five Eyes partners and other jurisdictions across the world to see how their similar types of instruments and decision-making instruments compare to what we're doing.
Perhaps most importantly as it relates to women, we are also applying a GBA+ lens to the table of disabilities to ensure that equity-seeking groups are not facing any barriers when they come forward to look for benefits and we use that table of disabilities in adjudicating their claims for disability benefits.
I should say that the table of disabilities also goes hand in hand with our entitlement eligibility guidelines. We use those two instruments to determine entitlement, and we use the table of disabilities to determine the level of disability. Both of those instruments are being updated, and they are also both being looked at under the GBA+ lens to ensure, again, that there are no barriers to access, for example, for women veterans and equity-seeking veterans when they come forward.
That work is ongoing, and we anticipate that we will have that work completed by the end of March. I would also note, in regard to the entitlement eligibility guidelines, that we continue to work on and to update those. There are 43 that we use in terms of decision-making, here in the centralized operations division.
In January 2022 we implemented new entitlement eligibility guidelines for sexual dysfunction, which is a condition that affects both male and female veterans coming forward, but in very different ways. That's a good example of how we will be updating those. As veterans come forward and are presenting with the same condition, the impacts can be very different depending on whether a veteran is male or female. We are going through our entitlement eligibility guidelines and the table of disabilities at the same time.