Oversight: “Counting the Money: Preventing Fraud and Abuse in VA’s Bonus Payment Practices for VA Employees”
House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
2025-07-22
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Source: Congress.gov
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Order I would like to welcome the members witnesses and audience to this hearing for the subcommittee on oversight and investigations. I appreciate my colleagues on the dais and the witnesses for being here to discuss the chronic issue of improper recruitment retention relocation incentive payments, these are commonly referred to as the three ours. These incentives are tools provided to the VA by Congress to attract and retain quality staff in positions that are consistently vacant or identified as difficult to fill. While many federal agencies can use these incentive payments, they are particularly helpful for an agency like the VA, whose mission is to provide complex services and quality health care to veterans across the entire country. These incentives are designed to be a part of a benefits package for positions in markets that are difficult to hire in, like specialist physicians, nurses, and social workers in rural areas. Congress gave federal agencies the ability to pay these incentives so that government entities, like the Veteran Health Administration, can be competitive in attracting and keeping quality healthcare professionals in a labor pool that is facing staffing challenges across the country. As a nurse practitioner, I understand these challenges firsthand. Unfortunately, recent reports have shown that these funds have been proven to be paid out with very little oversight. While this hearing was organized after the release of the June 2025 OIG report on the VA's poor oversight of these incentive payments, The problems we will discuss today are not new to the VA. In fact, in 2017, the OIG released a similar report detailing oversight issues with recruitment, relocation, and retention incentive payments based on the OIG's oversight work stretching back to July 2014. The 2017 OIG report identified the need to improve controls over the use of these incentives, having found that the VA did not properly authorize 33 percent of the retention incentives that were awarded to senior executives. The improper payments found in 2017 totaled more than $158 million in unsupported spending. As a result, the OIG made recommendations that the VA develop internal controls to monitor policy compliance and decrease the VA's reliance on retention incentives.
Now, here we are in July 2025, confronted with the same issues that the VA has failed to improve since the first report. The only difference is that now there is even more taxpayer dollars involved. For example, between 2020 and 2023, relocation payments grew by 85% and retention payments have grown by 131%, while recruitment bonuses have ballooned by a staggering 237%. I believe anyone would agree that these numbers are alarming when there's little data to back up the massive increases. The 2025 report acknowledged that after the initial report, VA implemented processes to improve authorization and review controls for the payments. However, VA employees inconsistently followed them. This made the good government improvements virtually useless. In response to the 2017 OIG audit, quality assurance teams were created at both the Office of Human Resources and Administration Operations Security and Preparedness and the VISN level. However, the 2025 OIG report found that while these teams identified errors, they did not address systemic issues in the request and authorization of incentives, did not proactively prevent incentive packages from being processed and paid, based on insufficient justifications. Additionally, the OIG found that 28 employees continued to receive annual retention incentives for many years after the initial award period expired. In one case, an employee continued to receive annual incentive awards for more than 11 years after the initial award period. In total, the VA improperly paid these employees a total of about $4.3 million. Between 2020 and 2023, more than 134,000 employees received incentive payments totaling $1.2 billion. 341 million of those incentives were found by the OIG to be improperly documented. The lack of documentation also hinders review efforts by oversight bodies like the OIG, the GAO, and this committee. I echo what the OIG said in their report that the required documentation helps provide assurance that incentives are properly used and effective oversight of incentives also requires sufficient documentation for review.
In fact, the OIG noted that much of the data used in the report relied on projections due to the VA's sparse documentation. I found it shocking in the report that when cases of waste, fraud, and abuse were discovered, the VA's implementation of established processes did not always guarantee that the issues were appropriately resolved. The 2025 report cited an example where VHA awarded $30,000 in relocation payments for an employee who never relocated. The employee was a remote worker teleworking from home. When someone receives a relocation incentive and never actually relocates, that's wrong and a clear waste of taxpayer dollars. Despite this clear case of impropriety, the VHA declined to recoup the payments that were made to this employee. These are taxpayer dollars set aside for veterans, and for far too long, they have been carelessly handled. I'm excited to hear the Trump administration's plan to not only satisfy the OIG's recommendations, but their plan to make real and necessary improvements and corrections in how the VA manages and oversees their incentive programs. The status quo is not acceptable, and we will continue to push the VA to make improvements that lead to better care outcomes for the veterans that are receiving VA services. I look forward to working with Secretary Collins and his team to right the ship and create real change at the VA. And I now recognize Ranking Member Ramirez for her opening comments.
Thank you, Chair Kiggins. Today's hearings topic is critically important. We are examining the use and the oversight of the quote unquote 3R incentives at VA. Recruitment, retention, and relocation bonuses. The so-called 3Rs help VA attract talent.
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