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WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas), the Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, delivered the following opening remarks, as prepared, at the start of the subcommittee’s oversight hearing on improper payments in VA’s compensation and pension programs:  

The subcommittee will come to order.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you to all our witnesses for being here.

Today, we are here to take a closer look at whether the Veterans Benefits Administration is a responsible steward of the more than 100 billion taxpayer dollars that Congress provides every year.

In short, that means paying each veteran the correct amount of benefits they have earned.

When V.B.A. makes underpayments, veterans’ budgets get stretched.

And when V.B.A. makes overpayments, taxpayer dollars are wasted, and veterans and their families get put in the difficult position of owing debts to V.A. simply because V.B.A. can’t get organized.

Year after year, V.B.A. leaders have failed to clean up their policies and procedures and eliminate improper payments in the pension program.

Over the last three years, the pension program issued over 1.3 billion dollars in improper payments.

That’s an error rate of more than 10%.

Over 860 million dollars were overpayments within V.B.A.’s control—usually because they failed to properly use some data or information that they had access to.

Much of the overpayments were due to V.B.A. failing to do their due diligence and verify veterans’ income information from the Social Security Administration.

That income information was inaccurate for over a decade.

When V.B.A. stopped relying on that Social Security income data, they started depending only on veterans to self-report any changes in their income.

That was massively error prone.

Many of the veterans did not understand that they had to report, or they were unable to do so.

We appreciate that several senior V.A. leaders have stated that veterans will not be forced to repay these pension overpayments.

But this never had to happen in the first place.

If V.B.A. had already implemented a reasonable, effective policy at any point during the last decade, the improper payments would have been reduced before they got out of control.

The improper payments situation in the disability compensation program is not encouraging either.

V.A. has declared victory here, but the underlying data is murky.

In 2021, someone at V.A. determined the improper payments had fallen below the reporting threshold, so they permanently stopped reporting.

They also stopped sampling and testing the payment data.

I understand they are still doing risk audits, but that seems to involve reviewing policies and procedures, not crunching the payment numbers.

Meanwhile, we are constantly encountering examples of incorrect compensation payments in the real world.

Just two weeks ago, surviving spouses testified at the full Committee hearing that V.B.A.’s long delays in discontinuing Dependency and Indemnity Compensation payments are creating overpayment debts that surviving spouses have to repay.

In September, we had a subcommittee hearing where we examined V.B.A.’s failure to process over 81,000 veterans’ requests to add or remove dependents.

We still don’t know exactly how many overpayments or underpayments that created.

Again, I appreciate the assurances we have heard from V.A. that it won’t claw back these debts from veterans that were caused by V.A.’s mistakes.

But this is just another example of how accounting problems cause havoc in veterans’ lives.

I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about a strategy to resolve the pension improper payments, and a better explanation about the disability compensation improper payments.

Transparency is crucial so veterans can have confidence in V.A. and the taxpayers can trust that their money is being spent on those who have earned it.

Today, we are going to be hearing from V.A. and the Office of Inspector General. I want to thank everyone, again, for being here.