Vermont DEC Reduces Payment Lead-Time for Petroleum Cleanup

There was a long lead-time to issue reimbursement checks to customers assisting with the Petroleum Cleanup Fund (PCF) because of redundancies in the review and appeal process. Only 31% of claims were paid within 30 days of receipt.

Innovation was needed to provide more time for staff to address reimbursement activity and money owed to the public and consulting community. 

The goal of the project was to achieve 90% reimbursement within 30 days of claim receipt date.

IMPROVEMENTS

Online reimbursement claim submissions are now being used because they are more efficient for all users. There are value added tools for checking on claim status and internal tracking of process metrics. Beta testing helped to determine changes were needed for managing claims with multiple invoices and user entry errors could misalign data flow between the online submission and our database.

Two final steps were needed before going to production. First, IT staff needed to create an automated email generated from the database that will serve as a routing form with all code information needed for issuing a payment. The staff will use the database in the payment process and complete the process within ANR online. Doing so will eliminate a time delay between systems that interrupts staff processing steps. DEC also needs to rollout the new version of ANR Online from test to production.

RESULTS

For the fourth quarter of 2018 (Oct-Dec), 93% of claims were paid within 30 days of receipt versus the 2013 baseline of 31%. 

For the fourth quarter of 2018, ANR internal processing time average was 10 days (median 6 days) versus the 2013 baseline of 47 days, a reduction of 79%.

Learn more at https://dec.vermont.gov/administration-innovation/lean/projects

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