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Today, Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas), the Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, delivered the following opening remarks, as prepared, at the start of the subcommittee’s oversight hearing on the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Veterans Benefits Administration’s (VBA) quality and training practices regarding decisions on veterans’ and survivors claims for VA benefits:

The subcommittee will come to order.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here.

Today, we are here to take a closer look at whether the Veterans Benefits Administration has implemented quality assurance and training programs to ensure that V.B.A. employees properly process and decide veterans’ and survivors’ claims for V.A. benefits.

Inadequate employee training and ineffective quality control processes have led to rework, wasted agency resources, and incorrect decisions on veterans’ and survivors claims for V.A. benefits.

When V.B.A claims processors have to redo their work, and when veterans and survivors have to appeal incorrect decisions on their claims, that adds months or years to how long veterans and survivors must wait to finally receive the benefits they are eligible for.

Given this bureaucratic headache, a lot of veterans just give up on pursuing their claims.

We recognize that it is difficult to balance the goal of issuing veterans’ fast decisions on their claims with the goal of issuing fair and correct decisions.

But we must ensure that quality is not sacrificed for quantity.

V.B.A. has made some improvements to its quality assurance and training programs, including some progress since we first notified V.A. of our intention to hold this hearing.

However, based on reports from the VA Office of Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office, there is much more work to be done.

Numerous V.A. O.I.G. reports have identified disproportionately high rates of errors in certain kinds of disability compensation claims and certain processing tasks.

Just last week, the V.A. O.I.G. issued a report in which O.I.G. estimated that V.B.A. had an error rate of roughly 75% in claims where veterans were seeking a 100 percent rating based on their inability to work. These are so-called T.D.I.U. claims. That’s way too high of a number and frankly, unacceptable.

O.I.G. estimated that from May 2022 to April 2023 alone, T.D.I.U. claims processing errors resulted in at least 100 million dollars in improper payments, and that improper payments could have been as high as 250 million dollars.

As another example, in a February 2024 report, O.I.G. estimated that V.B.A. had an error rate of 43% in claims where veterans were seeking benefits for hip and knee replacements.

O.I.G. estimated that from February 2021 to August 2022 alone, these hip and knee claims processing errors resulted in 3.3 million dollars in improper payments.

When errors result in underpayments, affected veterans do not receive the benefits they have earned.

When errors result in overpayments, V.A. wastes taxpayer dollars.

We owe it to veterans, their families, and the American taxpayer to hold V.B.A. accountable for low quality claims processing and decision-making.

I look forward to working with V.B.A.’s leadership and employees, as well as with G.A.O and O.I.G. – today and in the future – to ensure that V.B.A.’s quality assurance and training programs effectively prevent these errors from happening.

I yield to Ranking Member Pappas for his opening statement.