House Committee on Veterans' Affairs Review of VA's STAR Program

Veterans' Disability Benefits: VA Has Improved Its Programs for Measuring Accuracy and Consistency, but Challenges Remain, by Daniel Bertoni, director, education, workforce, and income security, before the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, House Committee on Veterans' Affairs 03/25/2010. Over the past several years, GAO has identified several deficiencies with the Veterans Benefit Administration’s (VBA) STAR program, and although VBA has taken actions to address these issues, it continues to face challenges in improving claims accuracy. For example, GAO found that STAR reviewers lacked organizational independence, a basic internal control principle. In response to our finding, VA began utilizing organizationally independent reviewers that do not make claims decisions. GAO also found that sample sizes for pension claims were insufficient to provide assurance about decision accuracy.

In response to GAO’s recommendation, in fiscal year 2009, VA began increasing the number of pension claims decisions it reviews annually at each of its offices that process pension decisions. VA has also taken a number of other steps to address weaknesses that VA’s OIG found in the STAR program, including (1) establishing minimum annual training requirements for reviewers and (2) requiring additional supervisory review of STAR reviewers’ work. Although it has made or has started making these improvements, VBA remains challenged to improve its decision accuracy for disability compensation decisions, and it has not met its stated accuracy goal of 90 percent. VBA’s performance has remained about the same over the past several fiscal years. GAO