House hearing reveals millions in improperly documented VA incentive payments

Efforts at combatting government waste found an oversight committee detailing the extent to which improperly documented incentive payments ballooned out of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Though Elon Musk’s time with the federal government has come to a close, the mission of curbing waste, fraud, and abuse carries on in the nation’s capital. This included a hearing Tuesday where the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations addressed tens of millions of dollars worth of questionable payments in recent years.

During the hearing, subcommittee Chair Virginia Rep. Jen Kiggans (R) outlined how, between 2020 and 2023, incentive payments from the VA for recruitment, relocation, and retention for more than 134,000 employees amounted to $1.2 billion.

Of that, the VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) found $341 million lacked proper documentation as the payments for relocation grew 85%, payments for retention grew 131% and recruitment payments increased 237%.

For far too long, VA has been spending thousands of dollars on sketchy relocation, recruitment, and retention incentive payment practices. This is unacceptable — plain and simple.

Listen to Oversight and Investigations Chairwoman @RepJenKiggans‘ opening statement from today’s… pic.twitter.com/zp6WPjUhLw

— House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (@HouseVetAffairs) July 22, 2025

As the release regarding the hearing detailed, the committee “uncovered that the Biden administration erroneously gave away thousands of dollars in improper bonus payments to VA DC office employees” related to recruitment, relocation, and retention, including in one instance where an employee was awarded $30,000 for relocation without even moving.

Speaking with Fox News Digital, retired U.S. Marine Corps Major Chris Lovell, CEO of Lovell Government Services, addressed what were called “the three Rs, which are recruitment, retention, and relocation.”

“It gives additional pay to folks … to keep them and retain them, especially if they have specialty vocations that the VA needs,” explained the veteran whose Florida-based business provides resources to the VA.

He went on to argue the agency could resolve record issues with a newer system rather than the over 30-year-old Defense Civilian Pay System still in use by the Department of Defense. “It’s a two-pronged approach to cleaning up what’s perceived as fraud and waste.”

“If [management says] they want to clean up erroneous payments or payments without documentation, then they need to supervise that … And the second piece of that improvement process … is the system,” said Lovell as the OIG had previously determined in 2017 that the VA had not properly authorized 33% of retention incentives amounting to a sum of $158 million.

That report prompted a bureaucratic response with the creation of quality assurance teams. “However,” as Kiggans said during the hearing, “the 2025 OIG report found that while these teams identified errors, they did not address systemic issues in the request and authorization of incentives and did not proactively prevent incentive programs from being processed and paid based on insufficient justifications.”

An egregious example showed that out of 28 employees who continued to garner annual retention incentives after the expiration of the award period found one received payments for more than 11 years. Altogether, they raked in around $4.3 million.

The latest oversight of the VA comes after the agency detailed earlier in July that a revision in workforce reduction meant less than 30,000 jobs would be cut by the end of the fiscal year rather than the initial target of 80,000.

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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