After a spate of cases involving the Department of Veterans Affairs wrongly declaring living veterans dead and suspending their benefits, the VA said it is working on a policy that eliminates the likelihood that human error will cause similar disruptions in the future.
In a letter to Rep. David Jolly, who brought several of the cases to light last month, the VA admitted it had accidentally revoked and then reinstated the benefits of 115 veterans who were not actually dead between July 2014 and April 2015.
“This is a problem that has gone on far too long and I applaud the VA for taking steps to prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future,” Jolly said Tuesday. “As we have seen, wrongly declaring a veteran dead can create financial hardships and it is extremely disconcerting.”
The letter came after Jolly pressured the VA to review the process by which agency officials revoked the benefits of veterans who had died. At least a half-dozen veterans in the area near Jolly’s southwest Florida district saw their VA benefits disappear after they were wrongly declared dead by the agency, the Washington Examiner reported in November.
Under the new policy, VA officials will rely on an automatic system to designate a veteran as legally dead that is based off the Social Security Administration’s database, rather than allow employees to make that determination manually.
The new policy will then require the VA to send the veteran in question a letter before stopping his or her benefit payments. Either a survivor of the veteran must confirm the death, or the veteran himself must reply to the agency and indicate that the death declaration was made in error.
The VA said it could not yet identify the individual reasons why all 115 veterans had had their benefits wrongfully suspended, but vowed to compile that data as soon as possible.
As an example of the scale of the VA’s mistakes, Jolly said he was contacted by a Vietnam veteran in California after news of the Tampa Bay-area cases made national headlines.
The veteran, Carl Colamonico, said the VA had not only declared him dead when he was still very much alive, but had put down in their records that he was buried in Riverside National Cemetery and that he had served in World War II, not Vietnam.
Jolly pushed the VA to review Colamonico’s case and restore his records.
