Investigation Finds Widespread Fraud in VA Disability Spending

If a military veteran says they have a disability, you probably imagine something very serious and potentially life-altering like a missing limb or brain injury as a result of combat. But an investigation found that the VA is currently paying out millions of dollars per year in disability payments for things most of us would not consider disabilities at all.

Taxpayers will spend roughly $193 billion this year for the Department of Veterans Affairs to compensate about 6.9 million disabled veterans on the presumption that their ability to work is impaired. VA officials say most veterans’ disability claims are legitimate.

Yet The Post found that millions of the claims are for minor or treatable afflictions that rarely hinder employment, such as hair loss, jock itch and toenail fungus.

About 556,000 veterans receive disability benefits for eczema, 332,000 for hemorrhoids, 110,000 for benign skin growths, 81,000 for acne and 74,000 for varicose veins, the most recently available figures from VA show. Individual payouts for such mundane conditions vary, but collectively they cost billions of dollars a year.

The report found there were 1,700 vets receiving disability payments for a missing limb. No doubt those payments are much larger than these others (though not in all cases, see below) but they are swamped by the hundreds of thousands of people receiving payments for minor issues. And the Post suggests there is a culture of fraud behind this. Individuals are encouraged to file as many complaints as possible to “milk the system.”

Veterans’ advocates, for-profit companies and VA itself encourage vets to file as many claims as possible to milk the system. The documents and data obtained by The Post spotlighted other obvious signs of waste and abuse, as well as an internal awareness and tolerance of such problems.

Critically, VA has failed to update antiquated rules that provide outsize benefits for some easily manageable ailments. For instance, VA typically pays veterans diagnosed with sleep apnea, a common breathing disorder, more than a combat vet with a leg amputated below the knee.

The post offers examples of some vets who claimed disability payments on the grounds they were paralyzed or paraplegic when in fact they were out gambling and hunting. These cases aren’t as common but the amount of money involved can be substantial.

In August, a peripatetic former soldier from Walla Walla, Washington, was arrested on charges of swindling VA of $244,000 by professing to be paraplegic even though he was agile enough to hunt elk and get into fistfights that drew the police. When VA officials began investigating, he vanished in a canoe and faked that he died by drowning in the North Woods of Maine, authorities said. After a year of searching, a fugitive task force finally nabbed him at an Amtrak station in Missouri.

A Post review of 70 fraud prosecutions since 2017 shows VA regularly falls victim to half-baked schemes. In three cases, men who never served a day in uniform fooled the department into thinking they were disabled war heroes; two of them also lied that they were held captive by the enemy, records show.

One giveaway that this culture of fraud has spread is the number of claims per person which has gone up dramatically over the past 20 years.

Veterans can — and increasingly do — file claims for multiple ailments. Last year, each disabled veteran received, on average, benefits for a combination of about seven injuries and illnesses, up from 2.5 per person in 2001. The Post found that it has become common for veterans to submit claims for 20 or more disabilities each.

Of course not everyone is doing this but there are enough people who are clearly bilking the system at this point that it’s hard to ignore.

Paul Mitchell, a Navy veteran from Greenville, South Carolina, who worked for the agency as a claims processor for 13 years until he retired in 2019, said he was “really gung ho” about his job at first because he wanted to help others who had served their country. But he became disillusioned by those trying to bilk the system.

Some vets, he said, improbably claimed up to 75 disabilities. “At some point it seemed like it really was just a game,” he added. “The veterans would say, ‘The government is handing out money, get in line.’”

The idea that the VA should say yes to vets as often as possible, an idea pushed under the Biden administration, has created a system in which even obvious cheating can continue for years.

Zachary Barton, a former Army medic from Florida, conned the government into giving him $245,000 to which was not entitled between 2017 and 2021, court records show. When he went to VA appointments, he parked in a spot reserved for disabled people and hobbled inside with a cane. Smelly and unbathed, he wore a diaper and a T-shirt that read, “Not All Heroes Wear Capes.”

A relatively young man in his 30s, Barton claimed to suffer from a long list of ailments: urinary incontinence, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, erectile dysfunction, spinal degenerative disease and a neurological disorder that caused one side of his face to droop. He said he could barely lift 10 pounds…

The scam worked until an anonymous whistleblower tipped off VA in 2019. Federal investigators searched online and found Barton bragging on Facebook and Instagram under the name “Zach Ryan” about being a weightlifting champion. Undercover agents placed him under surveillance and followed him to two gyms.

The pushback on this is going to be that anyone questioning the disability claims of a veteran is a monster who doesn’t respect their service. But that shouldn’t be good enough when there are clear instances of fraud and plenty of evidence people are gaming the system. 

Veterans are people and, unfortunately, people will scam the system if it’s clear no one cares if they do it. But it doesn’t sound like the Trump administration is up for taking this on. When the Post sent a copy of this story to the VA the response was “Unbelievably, the far-left Washington Post believes many Veterans don’t deserve the VA benefits they’ve earned.”

Claiming disability benefits for hemorrhoids isn’t most people’s idea of restoring a warrior culture. This really ought to be a situation where the Trump administration should (carefully and with all due respect for veterans) apply a corrective to the culture that has developed (with the help of the Biden administration).  At a minimum there should be an investigation to ensure more people people like Zachary Barton aren’t taking the taxpayers for a ride.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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