VA Missed 3 of 7 Payment Targets. It Still Passed.
Summary
VA's Office of Inspector General -- the department's independent internal watchdog -- found VA fully compliant with federal payment-integrity law for fiscal 2025. In the same report, flagged improper and unknown payments hit $3.9 billion, the highest total in at least four years, and three of the seven at-risk programs missed the improvement target VA had set for itself. The Pension Program cleared the legal ceiling by 0.01 percentage points. OIG issued zero recommendations.
A bigger number, a smaller rate -- both true at once
's own accounting says the $3.9 billion FY2025 total is $1.8 billion more than what it reported for FY2024 -- but also that its overall improper-and-unknown rate fell about 3.4 percentage points. Both can be true because the denominator changed: FY2025 was the first year folded Compensation, its largest program -- disability and other benefits paid to veterans for service-connected conditions -- into the improper-payment count at all, pushing the total pool of payments now subject to review to roughly $160.6 billion. Compensation's own improper-and-unknown rate came in low, at 1.49%, which is arithmetically friendly to a blended average even as it adds real dollars to the total. Measured against each program's own FY2024 actual rate, four of the other six programs improved. Two -- Medical Care Contracts and Agreements and Community Care -- got worse year over year. A separate comparison, against the targets set for FY2025, tells a wider story -- which is where this piece turns next.
Three programs missed their own target. None of it counted.
's compliance test has two different bars, and only one of them binds. Requirements 5a through 5c require to publish a reduction target for every at-risk program, then show 'improvement' toward it. Requirement 6 -- the only one with teeth -- requires each program's improper-and-unknown rate to stay under a flat 10%, full stop, regardless of what promised itself the year before. Medical Care Contracts and Agreements, Pension, and Community Care all missed their own FY2025 targets; 's report says so directly, attributing the misses to increased spending. None of the three breached 10%, so none of it moved the compliance needle. A program can get worse against its own plan and still be the reason signs off.
View data as table
| Purchased LTSS | 4.7% | Target was 13.00% -- beat it by a wide margin |
|---|---|---|
| Supplies and Materials | 0.6% | Target was 7.00% -- no longer high-risk |
| Beneficiary Travel | 7.6% | Target was 7.75% -- met it |
| Compensation | 1.5% | First year reported -- no FY2025 target existed |
| VA Community Care | 2.4% | Target was 1.80% -- missed |
| Medical Care Contracts and Agreements | 6.4% | Target was 2.25% -- missed by the widest margin |
| Pension | 10% | Target was 9.54% -- missed, and just 0.01 points under the legal 10% ceiling |
Pension's margin: one one-hundredth of a percentage point
Pension is the sharpest case. It exceeded 10% in both FY2023 (10.86%) and FY2024 (13.85%) -- 's recommendation to fix it has been open, unimplemented, since the FY2022 report. In FY2024, 's own target for Pension was 9.99%; the program missed it by 3.86 percentage points, landing at 13.85% instead. This year, Pension's actual rate is 9.99% -- the exact number missed by so much the year before -- clearing the legal 10% ceiling by 0.01 percentage points. That is a real, three-and-a-half-point year-over-year improvement, and also a coin flip's width from being the same non-compliance finding as last year. Purchased Long-Term Services and Supports, the other program had flagged as a repeat problem since its very first review in FY2020, shows a cleaner turnaround: 38.72% in FY2023, 13.52% in FY2024, and 4.74% now -- comfortably under both the statutory ceiling and its own FY2025 target of 13.00%.
View data as table
| FY2022 | 3.5 | Seven at-risk programs, pre-Compensation |
|---|---|---|
| FY2023 | 3.2 | Seven at-risk programs, pre-Compensation |
| FY2024 | 2.2 | VA not compliant -- Pension and Purchased LTSS over 10% |
| FY2025 | 3.9 | VA fully compliant, zero recommendations -- Compensation added to the reviewed pool for the first time |
The target that moved instead of the number
Medical Care Contracts and Agreements shows what happens after a target is missed and nothing enforces a fix. Its FY2025 target was 2.25%; it came in at 6.37%, a miss of 4.12 percentage points -- the widest of the three. Rather than holding the line, 's newly published FY2026 target for the program is 6.00%, just 0.37 points below where it actually landed this year. Community Care's target moved the same direction, from 1.80% to 2.25%, closer to its 2.39% miss than to its original goal. Pension's target alone held steady at 9.54%. Nothing in requires a target to get harder after a program misses it, and nothing in this report explains why reset two of the three that way rather than the reverse. Whether that reset produces real improvement or simply certifies the miss will not be visible until 's next Agency Financial Report and 's following compliance review -- on the twelve-to-fourteen-month cadence between this report and its FY2024 predecessor, that next check is likely to land sometime in 2027.
The takeaway
- Two compliance bars exist; only one binds. requires to set reduction targets and show improvement toward them, but the actual pass/fail test -- Requirement 6 -- only checks a flat 10% ceiling. Missing your own target carries no consequence as long as you clear that line.
- A real fix and a photo finish look identical in this report. Purchased Long-Term Services and Supports fell from 38.72% to 4.74% over two years -- genuine improvement. Pension fell from 13.85% to 9.99% -- also real, but landing 0.01 points from where it would have triggered the same non-compliance finding as FY2024. 's report treats both as equally 'satisfied.'
- Zero recommendations means no -tracked deadline this year. For the three programs that missed their FY2025 targets, there is no open recommendation forcing to explain the miss or commit to a fix -- only a newly published FY2026 target, two of which were set closer to the miss than to the original goal.
's report does not allege manipulated its reporting; the review team independently re-sampled 15 payments per program and verified 's statistical methodology. The $1.8 billion year-over-year increase and the four-year total trend are not a like-for-like comparison -- FY2025 is the first year Compensation was included and the first year Communications, Utilities, and Other Rents was not, so the seven-program set itself changed. 's own claim that it has cut improper and unknown payments by $12.57 billion (over 85%) since FY2018 is 's figure, cited in its FY2024 management comments, not an amount independently re-derived by in either report cited here.
Sources(2) ▾
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General, Review of VA's Compliance with the Payment Integrity Information Act for Fiscal Year 2025 (Report No. 25-04241-151) (2026-07-16) — 's annual compliance review under the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019, covering 's FY2025 improper-and-unknown-payment reporting. Source for the FY2025 total ($3.9 billion), the program-by-program reduction-target table, the finding of full six-requirement compliance, and the zero-recommendation conclusion. Fetched directly and converted with pdftotext -layout. vaoig.gov · original document
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General, Review of VA's Compliance with the Payment Integrity Information Act for Fiscal Year 2024 (Report No. 24-03777-113) (2025-05-21) — The prior year's compliance review -- the direct predecessor to the FY2025 report above. Source for the FY2024 noncompliance finding, the FY2022/FY2023/FY2024 total trend, the Pension and Purchased Long-Term Services and Supports Program's multi-year rate history (Table 2 and Table 3), and the standing history of both programs' unimplemented recommendations. Fetched directly and converted with pdftotext -layout. vaoig.gov · original document
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The Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019⧉ requires federal agencies to test their own programs every year for improper payments -- money sent in the wrong amount, to the wrong recipient, or that can't be verified as proper -- and to report, and fix, whatever they find. Each agency's inspector general then grades the homework. On July 16, 2026, VA's Office of Inspector General⧉ -- the department's own independent internal watchdog -- gave a clean bill: all six requirements met, zero recommendations. The same report puts 's flagged improper and unknown payments at $3.9 billion for FY2025, the highest total has reported in at least four years, and shows three of the seven programs tracks landed worse than the improvement target itself set twelve months earlier.