GAO AUDIT INDICATES VA BUDGET SHAM

Evans, Akaka lambaste accounting gimmicks that clipped veterans’ health care

Washington, DC – While calling for the establishment of user fees and increased copayments for veterans seeking health care, and altogether barring at least 260,000 veterans from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care system, the Bush Administration falsely claimed billions of dollars in unsubstantiated “management efficiencies” and used its phantom claims to offset VA budget requests for health care. 

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued late yesterday found VA was unable to provide any support for the estimates in the President’s past budget requests and that VA lacked a methodology for even making the savings assumptions.  A direct result of this potential $4 billion deception is that VA health care was inadequately funded, causing a decrease in veterans’ access to the system, and a series of emergency supplemental budget requests in order to keep the system running. 

“It’s unconscionable,” said Rep. Lane Evans (D-IL), Ranking Member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and co-requester of the GAO audit, along with his counterpart on the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, Senator Daniel K. Akaka (D-HI).  “Veterans needing health care are being penalized because of an accounting deception promulgated by this administration,” concluded Evans. 

Senator Akaka expressed similar concerns on the matter, “It is distressing that VA's health care budget over the past three years has been built like a house of cards.  Budgets must be built on solid facts, without that we will continue to have the shortfalls which jeopardize patient care.”

Evans and Akaka noted that replacing the Administration’s unfounded savings claims in the VA budget would have averted the need for the $1.3 billion supplemental request in 2005, would eliminate the need for all pharmacy co-payment increases implemented by this Administration since 2002, and would permit the 260,000 veterans previously denied access under an Administration edict, to enter VA’s health care system.

In addition to VA’s inability to prove claimed efficiencies, the GAO report cites a significant number of VA management inefficiencies documented by the VA Inspector General and GAO itself.

“When GAO opened the VA accounting books on this audit, they found an empty ledger – this Enron-styled accounting hurts real people,” said Evans.

VA concurred with GAO’s recommendations but denied that proposed management efficiencies were concocted to fill the budget gap.  Evans plans to address these matters during the House Veterans' Affairs Committee budget hearing on February 8, 2006.

A copy of the report can be found at:

www.veterans.house.gov/democratic/press/109th/pdf/gao06-359r.pdf

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