On Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it’s infamous backlog of disability claims has finally decreased to below 100,000 cases. This is an 85 percent reduction from 2013, when the backlog of veterans claims 125 days old or older was at its highest ever level.

The VA has been mired in scandal because of its penchant for shredding the wrong documents and inability to manage the thousands of disability cases it receives from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq veterans. Despite the controversy, knocking its backlog down to an encouraging 98,535 cases is definitely an improvement from the 600,000 claims it had in 2013.

The newly sustainable level of untouched disability claims, however, does not account for the thousands of pending claims stuck elsewhere in the process. The National Veterans Service has criticized the VA for spending valuable hours sorting out the backlog while many more veterans and their dependents wait endlessly for their disability compensation.

There are about 363,000 pending disability and pension claims waiting to be finalized by the VA.

“All they’ve talked about is reducing that part of the workload and that part of the backlog,” said Gerald Manar, deputy director of National Veterans Service. “They’ve done that, at least in part, at the expense of other work.”