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.