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.
