House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee Presses VA on Contracted Disability Exams After GAO Finds Overpayments and Oversight Gaps

At a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee oversight hearing, lawmakers pressed Veterans Benefits Administration officials on the quality of contracted disability examinations after the Government Accountability Office reported errors in incentive calculations and other oversight gaps.

GAO's Elizabeth Curta, director of education, workforce and income security, told the panel that GAO's 2024'25 work found breakdowns in procedures to identify frequent or complex exam errors, mistakes in incentive payments and a lack of direct examiner feedback. "None of the five [GAO] recommendations have been fully implemented," Curta said, and GAO identified nearly $2.3 million in incentive payments that were overpaid to contractors because MDEO lacked standardized checks for calculations.

Mary Glenn, deputy director of the Medical Disability Examination Office, Veterans Benefits Administration, acknowledged the problems and described steps MDEO has taken. Glenn said the office has recouped the overpayments noted by GAO and moved from a manual payment-verification process to an automated system with a written statement of operations and an audit contract. "We have an automated…