Duplicate Payments Bedevil V.A. Pension System, Workers Say

Puzzled, she set the claim aside and began digging into computer files for an answer. What she found surprised and worried her: the department’s database contained duplicate records for the widow, and the system was trying to pay her twice. It was also recommending a retroactive payment dating back months — though the widow had already been paid for that period.

After seeing the same problem in other claims, Ms. Ruell, who works on a quality review team at a veterans pension management center in Philadelphia, says she raised red flags with her bosses. If she, one of scores of payment authorizers nationwide, was just noticing the duplicate payments, was it not likely that the department had inadvertently overpaid many other people for years?

Two years later, that concern has not been resolved, Ms. Ruell and several other pension management workers say.

The department says duplicate payments are rare — perhaps fewer than 100 a year. A robust system of checks and balances, human and digital, routinely prevents a vast majority of such payments, said David R. McLenachen, the director of the department’s pensions and fiduciary service.

But Ms. Ruell and several of her colleagues, who described the problem for a reporter because they felt the department was not addressing it, believe that the duplicate payments are far more common, and costly, than their leadership acknowledges.

They say that they see new cases weekly and that the problem also occurs at the department’s other pension centers in Milwaukee and St. Paul. They express frustration that the department seems unable to prevent the creation of new duplicate records that can lead to duplicate payments. And they say their superiors do not consistently try to recoup overpayments — though the department denies that assertion.

“I’m just bothered the way money is wasted and no one cares,” said Ms. Ruell, 37, a lawyer who has worked at the pension center for five years.

The issue is starting to get attention in Washington. The department’s Office of Inspector General has begun looking into it, a spokeswoman said, and a congressman from the Philadelphia area says he will ask that the department provide an accounting of duplicate payments by Oct. 31.

“No one has a real handle on this,” Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Bucks County, said in an interview. “The V.A. management appears to believe it is not their responsibility to get our tax dollars back from people who should not have received the money in the first place.”

The department did not allow Ms. Ruell’s supervisors to talk about the duplicate payments. But Mr. McLenachen disputed her assertions, saying he was confident that managers were trying to collect overpayments.

“Our field employees are required to follow procedures,” he said.

Mr. McLenachen, however, acknowledged that it would be hard to determine the precise number of duplicate payments without beneficiaries coming forward voluntarily. Ms. Ruell says people have returned duplicate checks on their own, but only occasionally.

The duplicate payments are the flip side of the attempt to speedily eliminate a backlog in the processing of claims. While the backlog is widely blamed for delays in compensation to veterans, overpayments are unlikely to draw much criticism from veterans advocates.

Workers say that both delayed payment and overpayment stem from the same circumstances: too few workers trying to process too many claims in too little time. The pressure to work swiftly despite a complex system of benefits and rules, along with outdated or trouble-prone technology, has made human and computer errors all too common, the workers say.