VA overpaid third-party providers by $100 million, Inspector General says

[TexasTowelie]

new report by the Veterans Affairs Inspector General says that over the course of one year, the agency overpaid third-party providers by more than $101 million, mostly due to a bulk-payment process that lacked controls that would have prevented duplicate payments.

The money went to third-party administrators — HealthNet and TriWest — from March 2016 to March 2017 under the Patient-Centered Community Care Program, including Veterans Choice, which allows veterans to seek care at medical facilities outside the VA.

According to the report, the over-payments were the result of the VA’s use of a bulk payment process — designed to expedite processing — that failed to review individual claims and had inadequate internal controls to detect duplicates.

Before the bulk-payment system, the VA used controls including the “Program Integrity Tool,” to review claims. However, those tools led to long delays in repayment.

Read more: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/military/sd-me-va-overpay-20180906-story.html

[Midnight Writer]

1. How come you never hear of a government agency overpaying it's rank and file workers?

[Farmer-Rick]

3. Yeah, in the military, if you are overpaid, you are required by law to pay it all back

Even if it was the fault of the government, and not your fault, that you got overpaid. You have to pay every cent back even if you thought you were being paid fairly and it would be a severe hardship to you and your family to pay it back.

Why shouldn't that apply to contractors too?

[SWBTATTReg]

2. Yeah, and how come we don't see any honest vendors returning the excess payments? nt

[beemer27]

4. There is something wrong here.

How come business can have computers and computer programs to track payments in a timely manner but the VA is still contracting this kind of service out? Most business can manage to pay their bills in a month, but the VA takes half a year if they do it themselves, and overpays like crazy if they use private contractors. Perhaps a little more oversight of the management at the VA is in order.

[denbot]

5. Privatization

Color me surprised.