Paid Twice: $101.4 Million in Duplicate Community Care Payments

Before the $910.7M dental scandal, the Choice Program’s bulk payments to its administrators included $66.1M in straight duplicates — a payment method the OIG found had no controls capable of noticing.

The $910.7 million dental overpayments documented on this page were not the community care program’s first payment-integrity failure — they were its largest. Six years earlier, the OIG audited the "bulk payments" the VA made to the administrators running the Veterans Choice Program, Health Net and TriWest.

For a single year — March 2016 through March 2017 — the audit estimated $66.1 million in duplicate payments and $35.3 million in other payment errors: $101.4 million in overpayments to the administrators. The bulk-payment method, stood up in 2016, lacked effective internal controls to detect improper claims, so the VA’s own Office of Community Care failed to identify what the administrators submitted.

The OIG recommended controls to prevent duplicates across all current and future community care payment methods, and continued work with the administrators to reimburse the overpayments. The dental report of 2025 — same administrators’ ecosystem, same failure shape, nine times the money — is what happened next.

"for a total of $101.4 million in estimated overpayments to the TPAs"
— VA OIG

Source: VA OIG — Bulk Payments Made under Patient-Centered Community Care/Veterans Choice Program Contracts. Part of the VA Fraud library — see also the case files for the prosecutions these systems produced.