VA's veteran-travel program can't stop paying improperly

VA's Beneficiary Travel Program reimburses veterans and other beneficiaries for the cost of getting to medical appointments, including premium vendor-provided transportation, called special mode transportation (SMT), for beneficiaries who cannot travel by ordinary means.▸ In 2018, VA's inspector general audited the program and found ineligible riders, unvalidated vendor invoices, and above-rate ambulance payments. VA has since replaced the computer systems that processed these claims. A 2026 GAO report, testing newer records against the same categories of risk, found the program had made roughly $1 billion in cumulative improper payments since 2018 -- and that GAO's own data tests still turned up millions of dollars in the same kind of failure: staff manually overriding the new systems' automated checks.

By fiscal year 2016, VA's spending on special mode transportation had grown to $395 million, up from about $105 million a decade earlier.▸ VA's inspector general, auditing the program in 2018⧉, estimated that medical centers had improperly authorized SMT services for approximately 11,900 ineligible beneficiaries in the fifteen months between October 2014 and December 2015 -- either administratively or medically ineligible under VA's own criteria. In OIG's sample, 26 of 194 sampled beneficiaries (13 percent) had been improperly authorized at four of seven sites visited; the Detroit VA medical center alone accounted for 81 percent of those cases. Auditors projected that without stronger controls, an additional 59,500 ineligible beneficiaries could be authorized for SMT services over the following five years.

OIG also found that medical centers had not adequately validated 21 percent of sampled SMT vendor invoices before paying them, projecting approximately $23 million in improper payments nationwide over the same fifteen months, and a further $115 million at risk over the following five years absent stronger controls.▸ Separately, ambulance vendors were paid on average 60 percent above the lower federal rate VA was legally entitled to pay, an estimated $11 million in avoidable overpayments with $23.5 million more projected over five years.

A smaller finding -- eight beneficiaries who claimed mileage reimbursement for trips an SMT vendor had already been paid to provide -- added an estimated $229,000, with $1.1 million more projected if left unaddressed.▸ OIG's bottom line: without stronger oversight, improper SMT payments could cost taxpayers about $173.8 million through the end of 2020. VHA concurred with OIG's recommendations, with completion dates set for no later than December 2018.

VA has since retired the legacy VistA system that officials described as having 'very poor controls,' replacing it with two newer systems -- BTSSS for mileage claims and eCAMS for vendor-billed transportation -- built specifically to automate eligibility checks and flag claims for review.▸ A GAO report published in June 2026⧉ found that, despite those upgrades, VA reported approximately $1 billion in cumulative estimated improper payments across the Beneficiary Travel Program from fiscal years 2018 through 2024. The estimated improper-payment rate did fall, from about $215 million (24 percent of that year's outlays) in fiscal year 2018 to about $150 million (8 percent of outlays) in fiscal year 2024 -- a three-fold drop in rate, even as total program spending nearly doubled.

GAO also confirmed, with the VA inspector general, that 10 fraud cases tied to the program were adjudicated over the same period: eight cases of beneficiaries fraudulently reporting addresses to inflate mileage claims, totaling at least 892 fraudulent claims and $219,000, and a separate conspiracy in which a VA contracting official took a $100,000 bribe to steer $4 million in SMT vendor contracts.

GAO did not just rely on VA's own numbers.▸ Running its own tests against fiscal year 2018-2023 claims data, GAO's analysis identified more than $10 million in potential improper payments across three areas of risk. Fewer than 120,000 of 60 million mileage claims examined -- less than 1 percent -- had departure addresses that were potentially post office boxes or other nonresidential addresses rather than a beneficiary's home. Testing for duplicate SMT vendor payments found 365 duplicate invoices within one system worth $1.7 million, 2,616 duplicate invoices and claims shared between two systems worth $5.8 million, and 675 duplicate claims within the other system worth $1.3 million.

In a direct echo of the 2018 findings, GAO identified almost 20,000 mileage claims (about $966,000) and 615 SMT claims (over $900,000) where VA staff had manually overridden the new systems' calculated payment amounts, resulting in confirmed overpayments once GAO flagged the largest examples for VA's review.

VA reported spending over $2.3 billion on the Beneficiary Travel Program in fiscal year 2025, with special mode transportation -- the component both audits scrutinized most -- accounting for the largest share, approximately $1.88 billion.▸ GAO made nine recommendations, including that VA develop guidance for verifying residential addresses, communicate to invoice-processing staff the importance of checking for duplicates, and regularly monitor whether the controls meant to catch manually overridden overpayments are actually working. VA concurred with all nine and said it will take action -- language that echoes VHA's 2018 concurrence with OIG's recommendations on the same program, eight years and two computer systems earlier.