One VA staffer rubber-stamped benefits at 20 times the normal rate. That could be bad news for vets.

The Department of Veterans Affairs now has an enormous amount of paperwork to correct after a staffer “blindly” approved thousands of disability claims without properly reviewing them for close to two years. Experts said that some veterans whose claims were caught up in the employee’s approval blitz actually missed out on benefits, and its unclear if — or how — the staffer’s rubber-stamping might impact other vets’ wallets.

The VA acknowledged but did not answer repeated questions from Task & Purpose on whether veterans who received improperly approved benefits from the VSR’s error-ridden approval blitz would be required to pay them back .

Between sometime in 2022 and late 2024, a senior veterans service representative, or VSR, in Philadelphia approved more than 85,000 claims, a VA Office of Inspector General report released last week alleged, sometimes spending only minutes on each as they approved hundreds of packets a day.

After the news broke early last week, some military or veteran-centric social media pages lauded the VSR as a “hero,” seeming to assume that the VSR only approved claims that would get former troops more money – and that they might not have to pay it back if it was issued in error.

But veterans experts told Task & Purpose that such a high volume of erroneous claims could have serious downstream consequences for those whose claims the VSR made such short work of. While some claims were approved that should not have been, other veterans were underpaid when the VA employee ignored additional claims or special circumstances in their packages.

“I’m more concerned about that,” Jim Marszalek, a Marine veteran with 25 years of experience at the Disabled American Veterans, told Task & Purpose in an interview on Monday.

“Let’s say the veteran filed five claims, and the decision only noted four of them,” said Marszalek, who is the assistant executive director for DAV’s Washington, D.C. office. “I’m more concerned that they didn’t decide the fifth one.”

A spokesperson for the VA said that the agency was working on the OIG’s recommendation to “correct those errors to the extent possible” and evaluate how it can better oversee “authorization rate outliers.” 

The IG’s report estimated that the VSR’s errors resulted in $2.2 million in improper payments. The report said that errors resulted in both overpayments and underpayments. 

Approvals 20 times faster than normal

According to the OIG report, starting in 2022, the VSR in the Philadelphia VA Regional Office began approving more than 85,000 veteran disability claims — nearly 20 times the national average for their role. 

The staff member, who was unnamed in the report, spent an average of less than five minutes reviewing each claim. Senior members of the Veterans Benefits Administration, or VBA, began noticing the “unusually high authorization rates” sometime in 2023, according to the report, but inadequately responded to the issue. 

“It is not physically possible to do that many authorizations and perform the real functions of the job,” a senior administrator told the OIG in 2023. The inspector general received a hotline tip in July 2024, which triggered an investigation into the staff member. 

In some cases, the VSR did not even open documents to review the claims, flying through roughly 150 claims a day. Regional VA leaders attempted to impose a limit of eight to 10 authorizations for this VSR, but the employee often continued to approve disability claims at lightning speed.

“That’s disturbing – they knew about it,” Marszalek said. The senior VSR, experts told Task & Purpose, was the last in a line of disability claim processors. 

Top Stories This Week

“Those couple reviewers who really weren’t doing it, someone’s got to hold them accountable and make sure they’re actually doing the job,” Marszalek added.

The report said that of the 15,600 claims the VSR made in a six-month period last year, 84% contained at least one error based on a sample size of 32 cases, which resulted in improper payments to veterans, effects on other benefits and inaccurate VBA data. Some benefits claimed by veterans were ignored altogether.

The report also said that individual quality reviews did not accurately reflect the senior VSR’s work because regulators only looked at less than 1 percent of their work.

Will veterans be on the hook to pay back?

Marszalek said that “they could attempt to come after you for any money they erroneously overpaid you,” but added that it is unlikely in this case. A common solution that the VA has used in other overpayment cases, he said, has been to reduce a mistaken disability rating – which can be appealed by the veteran – to the entitled level without the VA requesting backpay. He noted that recoupment often stems from veterans fraudulently submitting paperwork for claims.

Being caught up in the Philadelphia mass-approvals, he said, “is not the veterans’ fault at all.” Veterans concerned about their status, he said, should use a veteran service organization such as DAV to review paperwork, file appeals or generally get support.

However, the VA also has a history of variously collecting overpayments, lawmakers have warned as recently as this spring, and the subsequent debt has often left veterans in a financially stressful and precarious situation. 

“Overpayments can result in VA establishing debts that veterans owe back to VA, which can create a paperwork nightmare for them and their families,” Rep. Morgan Luttrell, who chairs a House subcommittee on VA disability assistance, said in an oversight hearing in May. “But current law allows for VA to either cancel these overpayment debts, or waive collection of those debts.”  

Luttrell said that the VA issued at least $5.1 billion in overpayments between 2021 and 2024 and did not collect $677 million of that money. In one example included in the IG report, the Philadelphia VSR’s oversight led to one veteran receiving $14,300 in overpayment.

“It could be catastrophic for a veteran,” said Carl Bedell, an Army veteran and lawyer who has practiced veteran law for 16 years. “If the VA were to come back and say, ‘now you owe us for however many years of disability payment that you were not entitled to,’ that could be an absolutely catastrophic event for a veteran that’s already living day to day.”