Adjudicators spent hours manually cross-referencing medical records, policy law, and thick manuals just to land on a single disability rating, then checked their work again, because one mistake meant a performance hit.

When a claim was sent back to previous step as incomplete, the adjudicator sending got no productivity credit for handling it, plus had to manually re-enter information into oversized legacy forms just to process that return.

Are adjudicators wasting time opening a correspondence application they didn't always need to open? Two user interviews later, I found out I was wrong — and that was the best possible outcome.