VA facilities had difficulty identifying specific purchases for which the expenses were transferred. Image: ungvar/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe VA did not keep adequate records of how it spent supplemental funds under one of the early pandemic relief laws—the 2020 “CARES” Act—making it difficult to track how the money was spent, an inspector general audit has said.
Most of the supplemental money for the VA went to its Veterans Health Administration, which left it up to medical facilities whether to directly obligate the funds or to manually transfer money between those funds and regular appropriations accounts, the report said.
It said that about four-fifths of spending was done through the latter option, but “without guidance on the type of journal voucher documentation needed to support an audit trail, medical facility staff took on the responsibility of determining the most appropriate way to document the journal vouchers and satisfy the audit trail requirements.
“Consequently, medical facility staff could not always identify or provide evidence for this audit to support the dollar amounts denoted on the journal vouchers that were transferred for purchases using CARES Act supplemental funds. As a result, the medical facilities experienced challenges identifying specific purchases for which the expenses were transferred,” it said.
Those issues applied to both spending on salaries and spending on supplies and materials, it said.
Regarding the former, for example, it cited an expense of more than $700,000 related to salaries of nurses at one medical facility that lacked supporting documentation; auditors were told it could not be produced “because the staff who prepared and subsequently approved the transaction were no longer with VA.” And regarding the latter, the report cited $82,000 in “accrued expenses” at a facility which the audit team could not trace to any purchases.
The VA agreed with the IG’s recommendations to address those issues, although cautioning that years would be needed to comply with one of them, involving integrating payroll time and attendance records into other systems.
