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U.S.
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE
ON VETERANS’ AFFAIRS SUBCOMMITTEE
ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS HONORABLE
TERRY EVERETT, CHAIRMAN HEARING
II ON DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY (IT) PROGRAM September
21, 2000 OPENING
STATEMENT The
hearing will come to order. Good
morning! This is the
subcommittee's second hearing to follow-up on the Department of
Veterans Affairs (VA) information technology (IT) programs.
VA’s IT budget is $1.4 billion this year and has been close
to a billion dollars per year for the last ten years.
Our hearing will focus on VA computer security, VA’s efforts
to develop a department-wide data architecture, and VA’s computer
systems known as DSS and VISTA. We
will hear testimony from representatives of the General Accounting
Office, the VA Inspector General’s Office, and the VA, as well as
from Dr. Howard Green, the father of VA's decision support system. We
will again address the extremely serious department-wide information
security weaknesses revealed in GAO and VA IG reviews.
A
September 1998 GAO report stated, These "weaknesses place
critical VA operations, such as financial management, health care
delivery, benefits payments, life insurance services, and home
mortgage loan guarantees, and the assets associated with these
operations, at risk of misuse and disruption.
In addition, sensitive information contained in VA's systems,
including financial transaction data and personal information on
veteran medical records and benefit payments, is vulnerable to
inadvertent or deliberate misuse, fraudulent use, improper disclosure,
or destruction, possibly occurring without detection." Unfortunately,
I think the IG representative’s testimony may show how prophetic
these words were. The
department's past history in selecting and managing huge IT projects
has been extremely poor and has little to show in terms of better
service to veterans and return on investment for taxpayers. We
hear the VA's current motto of "One VA" a lot lately.
I want to know why the VA can’t reengineer its business
processes as a department, but why it keeps these efforts separate in
its three administrations. The
VA has yet to define its integrated IT systems architecture after
requests by this subcommittee to provide a unified plan with real
milestones. Ladies and
gentlemen, this isn’t “One VA"; this is three VAs marching to
three different drummers. We
will also hear how effectively the Veterans Health Administration has
used its $261 million dollar Decision Support System. Maybe
today we will also find out how much longer VBA's decade-old
modernization project, VETSNET, is going to take and what it is
finally going to do to improve services for veterans. Back to Witness List |