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According to a recent report, the Department of Veterans Affairs enrollment system has allowed more than 307,000 veterans to die before their applications were even processed. The inspector general for Veteran Affairs found that more than 800,000 records were stalled in the enrollment system when it comes to managing health care enrollment. All this data has been brought up when a whistleblower’s comments alleged a great mismanagement by the Veteran Affairs Health Eligibility Center. The staffers for the Veteran Affairs also identified staffers who incorrectly marked unprocessed applications as processed which in turn deleted an upward of 10,000 records in the past five years alone.

In one of the reported cases, a veteran applied for Veteran Affairs medical coverage in 1998 and has been in “pending” status up to the point they looked at the records, 14 years later. Another case was a veteran who passed away back in 1988 who still had an unprocessed record in 2014, 26 years after it was originally filed. CNN has investigated all these veterans’ deaths and more including highly detailed investigations in the winter of 2013 leading into 2014 about the deaths at two VA facilities, one in Georgia and one in South Carolina.

The most recent report shows a complicated system of inaccuracies with the VA’s system of managing health care enrollment data which include software glitches in the system, a lack of procedures when it comes to overseeing the records, as well as an inconsistency in identifying veterans who have passed away. The investigation goes on to state that Veterans Health Administration “has not adequately established procedures to identify individuals who have died, including those with pending health care enrollment records.” An internal investigation into the VA in 2010 found that several staffers had hidden some of the veterans’ applications in their desk to do them later, yet they were not disciplined.

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