Independent Review of VA’s Special Disabilities Capacity Report for Fiscal Year 2023

The VA OIG is required to report to Congress on the accuracy of VA’s annual special disabilities capacity report, which documents the department’s capacity to provide specialized treatment for veterans with spinal cord injuries and disorders, traumatic brain injuries, blindness, prosthetics and sensory aids, or mental health issues. 

Regarding the FY 2023 capacity report, the OIG team identified data inaccuracies and omissions. VA reported the wrong spending data for traumatic brain injury when it included obligations instead of expenditures data. VA also did not report traumatic brain injury spending data at the geographic service area and national levels as required. Further, the OIG found that blind rehabilitation bed data were not reported by geographic service area as required but were reported nationally. The capacity report also did not capture data on the services that veterans received through community care or the extent to which bed capacity was used at VA’s centers for spinal cord injuries and disorders.

As the OIG reported previously, VA cannot meet the requirement to compare its mental health capacity with 1996 levels as federal law requires because of changes in defining and tracking treatment outcomes of veterans with mental illness. The OIG continues to believe that such reporting would not provide Congress with assurances that VA’s capacity is adequate to provide care to these high-risk veterans. Finally, some medical facilities’ transitions to VA’s new electronic health record system have affected the completeness of some reported data elements at facility, regional, and national levels. The OIG notes that VA could give Congress insight into annual trends by correcting the data differences to define the measures consistently for comparability across facilities or by reporting capacity data separately for facilities using the new system.