307,000 veterans died awaiting Veterans Affairs health care, report says
Hundreds of thousands of veterans listed in the Department of Veterans Affairs enrollment system died before their applications for care were processed, according to a report issued Wednesday.
The VA's inspector general found that out of about 800,000 records stalled in the agency's system for managing health care enrollment, there were more than 307,000 records that belonged to veterans who had died months or years in the past.
In a response to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs' request to investigate a whistleblower's allegations of mismanagement at the VA's Health Eligibility Center, the inspector general also found VA staffers incorrectly marked unprocessed applications and may have deleted 10,000 or more records in the last five years.
In one case, a veteran who applied for VA care in 1998 was placed in "pending" status for 14 years. Another veteran who passed away in 1988 was found to have an unprocessed record lingering in 2014, the investigation found.
For more than a year, CNN investigated and reported on veterans' deaths and delays at VA facilities across the country, including detailed investigations in November 2013 and January 2014 examining deaths at two VA facilities in South Carolina and Georgia.
The report released Wednesday reveals a web of complications with the VA's management of health care enrollment data, including a lack of procedures to oversee records, software glitches within the records system and inconsistency in identifying veterans who have died.
The inspector general found the VA's office responsible for enrollment "has not effectively managed its business processes to ensure the consistent creation and maintenance of essential data."
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