Damning Internal VA Report; what should be done?

The Veterans Affairs Department's system for verifying whether a veteran is alive or dead contributes to costly or embarrassing errors, including compensation being paid to veterans who have passed away and records indicating they had visited doctors after they died, according to an internal VA report.

The report, a review of the VA's death records sources, found the department's medical records system lists as active patients 2.7 million veterans who are, in fact, dead.

But the VA can't expunge them from their rolls because the death notices came from sources such as the Social Security Administration, Medicare, the Defense Department and other government entities that the VA does not accept as proof of death.

The VA accepts only actual death certificates, a record of a death at a VA facility or a notification from the National Cemetery Administration as sufficient verification to remove a veteran from the system, according to department officials.

This method of record-keeping creates confusion over who is receiving care and benefits, and has prompted charges that nearly 30 percent of the 847,882 veterans waiting to hear whether they are eligible for VA health care died before they ever received word of a decision, as was reported Monday in the Huffington Post.

According to VA, the veterans are on the "pending eligibility" list because they must furnish either additional proof that they served or verify that their income meets the required threshold for care.

But whistleblower and VA employee Scott Davis told Military Times on Tuesday that the VA is failing its veterans by not keeping decent records and not following up to ensure that veterans are still in need of care.

"Every year, thousands of veterans lose their eligibility for VA health care due to the agency's inactions and some are dying while they wait," he said.

Another problem with the poor record keeping: dead patients making and keeping doctor's appointments, receiving checks and filling prescriptions.

According to the internal VA report published April 1 by the department's Date of Death Workgroup, the records of 10 percent of veterans in the VA system indicated "activity" — they received compensation payments, visited a doctor, made an appointment or had a prescription filled — after their actual date of death.

The discrepancy is likely the result of a gap between the actual date of death, as determined by a source outside VA such as Social Security, and the date when the department receives notice through one of its accepted official channels.

In one case, however, such a miscommunication allowed 76 prescriptions to be filled at one pharmacy for controlled substances such as oxycodone, hydromorphone and Valium.

And, according to the report, some prescriptions have been filled years after the date of death — "on average, almost 12 years after the date of death."

In addition to reviewing "activity" by patients after their deaths, the internal working group analyzed the list of pending applications to enroll in the VA health care system dating to 1996. Nearly 900,000 veterans are pending eligibility.

But the list is actually much shorter, according to outside government sources. The report found that 2.3 million veterans with applications for VA enrollment actually are deceased.

A VA spokeswoman said the report points to the need for the VA to improve its methodology for verifying deaths.

"The reason for this report was to figure out the lay of the land and be able to ask these questions" about how to improve record-keeping," the spokeswoman said.

The working group recommended that VA develop an algorithm to identify individuals whose dates of death could be updated from other sources.