The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs incorrectly gave veterans about $5 billion more in disability compensation and pension payments than it should have in the last four fiscal years — an error that lawmakers say is recurring and getting worse.
In an oversight hearing Wednesday, the House Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs pressed VA officials to explain how the agency planned to rectify a problem that regularly creates financial nightmares for veterans when they are asked to pay the money back.
“Our veterans live paycheck to paycheck,” said Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, who chairs the subcommittee. “A lot of them are in a deep, dark, black hole.”
Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Ky., said committee staff members visited the VA’s Debt Management Center in February and met veterans who were “confused, angry and even suicidal because they incurred a debt they didn’t know about.”
The VA issued at least $5.1 billion in compensation and pension overpayments from fiscal year 2021 to fiscal year 2024, Luttrell said. The VA said it overpaid nearly $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2024 alone.
The VA only collected a “portion” of the four-year debt, meaning the agency wasted roughly $677 million in taxpayer dollars, Luttrell said.
Agency officials said many factors lead to overpayment, including administrative errors as well as veterans’ failures to report dependents they no longer have and other changes to their eligibility or status.
Nina Tann, executive director of the VA’s compensation service, said the agency, which serves about 9.1 million people, has a “heightened risk” of making improper payments due to the large number of beneficiaries and the high-dollar amounts it doles out.
Tann said the agency has taken steps to prevent, detect and correct the issue, including being better about notifying veterans that they need to report changes.
Tann also said the VA fixed an administrative error in January that had been causing duplicate payments for about 15,000 veterans with dependents in fiscal year 2024. The agency did not force those veterans to repay the money, she said.
The overpayments sometimes span many years. In 2023, the VA temporarily suspended the collection of pension debts for thousands of low-income wartime veterans and their survivors after the agency identified an issue with income verification that led to overpayments between 2011 and 2022.
Overpayments also stem from a little-known federal law that prohibits veterans from receiving both disability compensation and special separation pay, or lump-sum incentives that were offered when the U.S. had to reduce its active-duty force or release slightly injured service members.
Since fiscal year 2013, the earliest year for which the VA shared data, the VA has clawed back more than $2.5 billion from about 122,000 disabled veterans who had unintentionally received both benefits, NBC News previously reported.
Luttrell said veterans should not be responsible for correcting government-made errors.
“That’s our fault,” he said. “We have to fix that problem.”
A clear path forward was not established during the roughly one-hour hearing, and Luttrell asked Tann to continue speaking to him afterward.
“Our heartache is the fact that it’s trending in the wrong direction,” Luttrell told the agency officials. “We’re losing ground.”
