Federal Reports

Semiannual Report to Congress, highlighting the activities and accomplishments of the U.S. AbilityOne Commission Office of Inspector General from October 1, 2024, through March 31, 2025.

VBA provides tax-free monthly compensation payments to veterans for disabilities incurred or aggravated during active military service. Additionally, VBA awards special monthly compensation (SMC) for certain severe disabilities or combinations of disabilities.

SMC is a difficult topic for claims processors to learn and apply. When this review began, VBA had two versions of an SMC calculator to help claims processors. One version was the Veterans Benefits Management System for Rating (VBMS-R) calculator, which allowed information generated by the calculator to automatically populate in the appropriate fields. In November 2023, the VA OIG received an allegation that the VBMS-R calculator did not generate accurate results for several disability combinations, and that these errors could result in veterans being underpaid. The OIG conducted this review to assess whether the VBMS-R calculator was producing inaccurate results as alleged.

The OIG review team confirmed that the VBMS-R calculator generated inaccurate results for the disability scenarios listed in the allegation and for several others identified by the team. For some errors, the VBMS-R calculator produced incorrect results that would cause incorrect payments—most of which would be underpayments—if claims processors relied on them. Additionally, the VBMS-R calculator sometimes generated an alert message that the request failed rather than producing SMC results. Officials from VBA and VA’s Office of Information and Technology could not determine the cause of the errors or how long they had been occurring. In October 2024, the VBMS-R calculator was disabled and was still inactive as of February 2025.

The OIG made two recommendations to the under secretary for benefits to ensure all erroneous scenarios in the VBMS-R calculator identified in this review are corrected and establish a plan to conduct additional testing of the tool to ensure its accuracy.

The Office of the Inspector General conducted an evaluation to determine if fire‑protection and ammonia safety systems at TVA coal plants were being properly maintained and identified issues were being addressed.  We determined ammonia systems were being properly maintained and identified issues were being addressed.  However, we determined fire protection systems were not always properly maintained and issues were not always being addressed timely.  Specifically, (1) some inspections and testing of fire-protection systems were not performed as required, (2) some fire-protection system issues were not resolved timely, and (3) one fire-protection subsystem was missing safety locks at 1 plant, which was subsequently addressed.  In addition, we identified concerns with documentation, including incomplete fire-protection impairment documentation and discrepancies in the required frequency of inspections between the fire protection Standard Programs and Processes and site‑specific job plans, which provides details of each plant’s fire-protection subsystems. 

The National Security Agency (NSA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) publicly released an unclassified version of its Semiannual Report (SAR) to Congress summarizing the OIG’s oversight work during the first half of fiscal year 2025. 

As required by the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended (IG Act), the SAR was transmitted to Congress on 29 May 2025. 

Congress enacted the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA) of 2016 to improve opioid therapy and pain management for veterans. Within CARA, the Jason Simcakoski Memorial and Promise Act (Jason’s Law) requires each Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical facility to have a pain management team (PMT) to coordinate and oversee pain management therapy. The Pain Management, Opioid Safety, and Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PMOP) was established in part to ensure the requirements of CARA and Jason’s Law are met.

In fiscal years (FY) 2022 through 2024, the PMOP received $647 million in specific purpose funds to support pain management and opioid safety programs primarily at the medical-facility level. However, the PMOP returned about $126.7 million unused in FYs 2022 and 2023. The VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted this audit to evaluate the PMOP’s management of specific purpose funds.

The OIG found the PMOP did not always effectively communicate with VISNs and medical centers so that they could plan for efficient use of funds. In addition, the program did not always communicate important funding information with key officials before allocating funding. Finally, VHA and the PMOP need to strengthen oversight to ensure fully compliant PMTs are in place at each VHA facility.

The OIG made five recommendations to the under secretary for health. The OIG agreed to close two; VHA has already taken sufficient action related to instructing the PMOP to communicate pertinent funding information with key staff before the start of the next fiscal year. VHA also agreed to ensure the program clarifies and defines PMT requirements and establishes a way to periodically validate PMT information and to require the program and the chief operating officer to address each medical facility’s lack of progress in achieving a PMT.

Section 487(a)(17) of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended (HEA), requires postsecondary schools participating in Title IV programs to annually report data, including data relevant to students’ cost of attendance and financial aid and the schools’ graduation rates, to the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to the satisfaction of the Secretary. The objective of our inspection was to determine whether the University of Texas Permian Basin (UT Permian Basin) reported verifiable data to IPEDS for the 2021–2022 reporting period. We determined that the UT Permian Basin reported verifiable data to the Department’s IPEDS for the 2021-2022 reporting period. Specifically, all data elements that we selected and reviewed that the school reported through the Graduation Rates, Institutional Characteristics, and Student Financial Aid surveys for the 2021–2022 reporting period were supported by datasets, information system reports, or other records. Because all the data sets that we reviewed were verifiable, we do not make any recommendations in this report. However, our results are limited to the data sets we reviewed, and it is critical that the UT Permian Basin continue to report verifiable data to IPEDS. 

This Office of Inspector General (OIG) Healthcare Facility Inspection program report describes the results of a focused evaluation of the care provided at the VA Oklahoma City Healthcare System in Oklahoma. 

This evaluation focused on five key content domains:
     •    Culture
     •    Environment of care
     •    Patient safety
     •    Primary care
     •    Veteran-centered safety net

The OIG issued three recommendations for improvement in two domains:
   1.    Environment of care
     •    Safe and accessible pathways to clinical areas
     •    Medical equipment preventive maintenance
   2.    Patient safety
     •    Recording leader attendance at meetings to monitor test result communication data