Veterans may have received lower monthly disability payments than they should have due to errors made by a computer used by the Department of Veterans Affairs to calculate the amount they should be paid, a federal watchdog found.
It’s unclear how far back the miscalculations go, but some veterans with particularly serious disabilities — like amputations — may have been short-changed anywhere from $132.74 to $4,170.59 in their monthly disability checks. Other veterans may have received overpayments as high as $373.18, according to a VA Inspector General report released this week.
In unearthing the errors in the VA’s payment calculation system, the IG did not examine any actual payments made to veterans, and did not determine whether any actual veterans had been underpaid. Instead, the report found that the VA’s “overreliance” on a specific computer program “could have resulted in incorrect monthly benefits payments.”
“These disability scenarios were not based on specific veterans’ claims but could exist in actual claims,” the IG wrote in a footnote.
VA officials told the IG that the error-prone program has since been taken offline, according to the report, and agreed with its central findings.
“The Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) concurs with the report findings and recommendations and is developing a plan to implement the recommendations. This report highlights an opportunity for VBA to strengthen its processes on this topic,” VA officials told the IG.
Two calculators produce different amounts
The possible underpayments, the IG found, came from the use of two different computer systems to calculate payments, which the VA refers to as calculators. VA officials referred to the older calculator as the “legacy calculator,” while the newer one was meant to be “more user-friendly” by automating some tasks.
The newer system, the IG found, produced incorrect sums when adding so-called special monthly compensations on top of a veteran’s primary disability payment. The special compensations are added to some veterans’ monthly benefits payments for certain severe disabilities or combinations of disabilities.
In order to receive monthly disability compensation, veterans have to first receive a disability rating from the VA through a sometimes arduous process that involves submitting a claim, having military and medical records reviewed, and undergoing a VA clinical exam. Certain health conditions typically qualify for a 100% disability rating, while others determine ratings that range from 0 to 100%.
But beyond those percentage-based payments, the special monthly compensations are added for severe cases like an amputation, limb loss, loss of sight, or for those who are permanently bedridden or need help with daily basic needs like getting dressed or eating. The VA uses letter codes for each.
The legacy calculator version, released in 2011, forced VA processors to manually enter those codes. The newer version would “automatically populate the appropriate fields,” but ended up assigning “incorrect” compensation amounts “that would result in underpayments to veterans or gave an error message,” the IG found.
Officials from the VA’s Veterans Benefits Administration and Office of Information and Technology “could not determine the cause of the errors or how long they had been occurring,” according to the IG.
VA officials were not able to determine when the automatic version was released, but found the first “documented release” in 2017. However, according to the report, some VA claims processors did continue to use the manual version because “some users preferred its format” — making it unclear which claims may have been affected.
In October 2024, the VA notified claims processors to only use the manual version. The automatic calculator was disabled and inactive as of February 2025.
The IG recommended that the VA correct all of the calculator errors, develop a testing plan and certify the results to the IG. VA officials told the IG that it completed initial testing of the defects, disabled the calculator and plans to report a testing plan to the IG by July 31.
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