If frustration of elected officials and hundreds of thousands of veterans were enough to solve a problem, the backlog of claims at the Veterans Affairs Department would be resolved by now. But frustration is not enough — and the backlog remains.

In fact, despite claims from VA officials that progress is being made, the problems could be growing worse as more veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars enter the system.

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-3rd, of Butler visited with veterans and veterans groups here a year ago to hear about the problems local veterans were having with long waits for claims processing. Today, a year later, the long waits persist.

Butler County’s director of veterans affairs, John Cyprian, said in a story published Monday that the latest reports indicate that 900,000 claims are in the VA system — and the current backlog is about 600,000. The VA reports the average wait time to process a claim is 273 days. The wait time in the Pittsburgh office, which handles claims for Butler County, is 379 days.

Cyprian called the wait times “unacceptable.”

VA officials in Washington claim they are making headway, adding that conversion from a paper-based system to a digital system will speed up processing of claims.

But frustrated veterans can be excused for being skeptical of VA promises of faster claims handling, thanks to computerization of records. In many cases, conversion to digital does have advantages, but it’s a massive undertaking to scan in mountains of paper documents. And once digitized, there can be unforseen problems, such as one database not communicating with another.

In fact, stories in 2010 of overpayments to veteran’s widows in Philadephia were blamed on a new database not catching duplicate payments coming from a different database — resulting in thousands of duplicate payments that should have been caught before checks were issued.

The VA claims backlog has been going on for years and is probably going to get worse. About a year ago, when Kelly was hearing from veterans in Butler, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., heard testimony in Washington about 188-day waits and an error rate of 16 percent in handling claims. Issa called the backlog and errors unacceptable.

Issa said the problems are not new, adding, “The system was broken in the Vietnam War when I enlisted, and it was never fixed. . . . The VA continues to claim it will get better, but they have not gotten better.” Issa said that in April 2012.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki told CNN last month that the conversion to electronic records is progressing, and the VA will fix the claims backlog by 2015. He noted that the VA budget will see an increase, while other federal agencies are seeing budget cuts. Shiseki suggests that increase indicates the Obama administration’s commitment to fix the problem.

But throwing money at a problem does not necessarily fix the problem. A recent study by the House Veterans Oversight and Investigations Committee found evidence that the VA’s problems are worse than reported. It appears that wait day numbers are unreliable and that some claims are closed out because they are too old or the vet died.

The scandal of the ongoing VA claims backlog raises questions as to whether the system is too big and too complex to manage. That scenario has raised questions, at least among critics of the federal government, about the implementation of Obamacare and the expanded federal role in health care.

Veterans can only hope that pressure from lawmakers like Kelly and Issa, as well as hundreds of thousands of frustrated vets around the country, will have an impact. But the fact that the problem has been going on for so long does not offer much hope of a quick solution.

Next April, if the Eagle revisits the issue and asks Cyprian about the wait times for processing veterans’ claims in Butler County, it would be a shame to hear the same stories of yearlong waits.

Veterans deserve better. Americans should expect the federal government to manage veterans benefits more effectively and efficiently.