VBA’s Fiduciary Program protects vulnerable individuals unable to manage their own VA benefits due to injury, disease, infirmities, or age. The program appoints and oversees fiduciaries to manage those payments.
Each beneficiary must have a record in the Veterans Benefits Management System–Fiduciary (VBMS-Fid), the fiduciary program’s case management system, so staff can assess beneficiaries’ well being and prevent misuse of those funds.
The OIG conducted this review to determine whether VBA had procedures to ensure beneficiaries’ records were created and that staff oversaw fiduciaries as required.
The OIG found VBA did not create VBMS-Fid records for 311 beneficiaries deemed incompetent from June 10, 2003, to June 30, 2023, and who had received about $24.5 million in VA compensation and pension benefits without oversight. Although this was less than 1 percent of all FY 2023 beneficiaries, their risk of harm was significant because the program was not monitoring their financial, physical, or mental well-being. This lapse occurred primarily because records did not migrate to VMBS-Fid from legacy systems or staff did not manually create the records.
Overall, the program failed to oversee these beneficiaries because it lacked controls to identify when they did not have an electronic fiduciary record. Beneficiaries with fiduciaries whose records did not migrate to VBMS-Fid were supervised by fiduciaries who were acting without program oversight for more than three years, and beneficiaries who never had a record established received no oversight—some for potentially as long as 15 years. If there had been a monitoring system, the program could have identified the 311 beneficiaries and placed them under the program’s protection.
VBA implemented the OIG’s three recommendations to establish records for the 311 beneficiaries, resume oversight activities to assess the well being of beneficiaries and the use of funds, and implement controls to flag beneficiaries without records.
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