Department of Veterans Affairs officials said Monday they have made great progress in reducing the numbers of veterans waiting for benefits decisions.

In a news conference at a VA clinic in Golden, Denver officials presented statistics of success:

The number of pending disability claims for Colorado veterans is down to 7,443 after peaking at 13,277 in November 2012. The average time taken to complete a benefit claim has been cut in half, from more than a year to 206 days. By focusing on the oldest claims first, the number of veterans with claims pending one year or longer has been cut by 85 percent in two years.

VA officials said that record reflects the most significant transformation in agency history to improve the delivery of benefits to veterans, their families and survivors. Nationally, they report, the backlog of veterans awaiting decisions has been cut from 611,000 in March 2013 to 110,000 this week.

Renaye Murphy, the Denver regional director of the Veterans Benefits Administration, said her office staffers, most of whom are veterans, not only achieved a reduction in pending claims but got high marks for accuracy and helping veterans cure home loan defaults. But so far, the regional VA office has not been able “to complete veterans’ appeals as timely as we would like to,” she said.

Kelly Kennedy, a spokeswoman for the law firm Bergmann and Moore, said pending appeals of benefits decisions are a growing problem nationally. From March 2013 to now, the pending appeals cases have grown from 247,000 to 310,000, she said.

“VA pushed all of its resources toward the initial claims — the Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans,” she said. “They definitely needed to bring that backlog down. But they pulled those resources away from the older cases, which means you have World War II and Vietnam War vets dying before their claims are ever resolved.”