PHILADELPHIA — In July 2010, a Department of Veterans Affairs employee named Kristen Ruell was updating a benefit claim when she noticed something odd. What should have been an increase of about $2,000 in a monthly payment to the widow of a veteran showed up on her computer screen as $21,000.
Puzzled, she set the claim aside and dug 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, 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, 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 McLenachen, director of the department’s pensions and fiduciary service.
But Ruell and several of her colleagues, who described the problem for a reporter because they felt the department was not addressing it, think 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, Minn.
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 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,” Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick, R-Bucks County, said in an interview. “The VA 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 Ruell’s supervisors to talk about the duplicate payments. But 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.
One Philadelphia employee, Ryan Cease, whose job for a time included correcting duplicate records, said it could take hours to fix one. Cease, who says he has found evidence of more than 1,200 duplicate pension records, proposed creating a team to tackle the problem. Supervisors have not responded, he said.
The veterans pension system, part of the sprawling Veterans Benefits Administration, pays more than $4 billion a year in benefits, mainly to low-income veterans. It also provides benefits to the survivors of veterans, who can receive monthly compensation even after a veteran dies.
Both management and workers agree that the duplicate payments began about three years ago when the department started shifting from an older computer system to new technology known as the Veterans Service Network, or Vetsnet.
The old system, workers say, did not allow more than one record for a veteran or relatives of a veteran. But with Vetsnet, workers say, the technology allows duplicate records.
Duplicate records do not always cause extra payments, the workers noted. But if an unsuspecting claims processor updates a duplicate record, the computer might calculate benefits as if the person had filed a new claim. And that could lead to a second monthly check and a large retroactive payment.
