The PACT Act’s Wrong Dates: 31,400 Claims, $6.8 Million

The effective date on a claim decides how much back pay a veteran gets. On PACT Act claims, the OIG estimated wrong dates in 24% — 31,400 claims — because VBA sent processors in with bad tools and no training.

The PACT Act was the largest expansion of veterans’ benefits in a generation — new presumptive conditions for toxic exposures, with effective dates that determine how many months or years of retroactive compensation a veteran receives. Get the date wrong and the veteran is shorted, or overpaid and later clawed back.

From a statistical sample of claims completed in the PACT Act’s first year, the OIG estimated incorrect effective dates in about 31,400 of 131,000 claims. In an estimated 26,100 of them the wrong date produced at least $6.8 million in improper payments; at least 2,300 more claims were decided prematurely, without enough evidence, so their monetary impact could not even be determined.

The OIG’s diagnosis was institutional, not individual: PACT Act dates are genuinely complicated, and VBA failed to prepare its people — a standard operating procedure without detailed guidance, two automated tools that were unreliable, and necessary training not initially provided. The veterans who waited decades for these presumptions got, one time in four, the wrong start date.

"incorrect effective dates were assigned for about 31,400 of 131,000 (24 percent)"
— VA OIG

Source: VA OIG — The PACT Act Has Complicated Determining When Veterans’ Benefits Payments Should Take Effect. Part of the VA Fraud library — see also the case files for the prosecutions these systems produced.