What should be a cut and dry report on the effectiveness and efficiency of the Department of Veterans Affairs is turning into a classic case of ‘he said, she said.’

We reported last week that the Office of the Inspector General discovered that more than 300,000 military veterans died before their disability claims and healthcare cases were even reviewed by the VA. The reason the OIG investigated the VA in the first place was because VA employee Scott Davis leaked internal documents suggesting that 238,000 veterans had passed away before receiving any care.

In an official blog post written by Acting Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Operations and Management Janet Murphy, however, the VA is denying that the situation is as badly as its own inspector general or the media made it seem.

At first, Murphy’s post acknowledges that the VA’s system for cataloging and enrolling veterans is “confusing to Veterans and our stakeholders” and are in dire need of reform. After tossing that twig of an olive branch, Murphy begins to outright deny the conclusions of the OIG’s report on the grounds that the VA’s data is too convoluted to be accurate.

The OIG found 307,000 out of the over 800,000 pending enrollment system records were for individuals the reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration, and that VA OIG could not determine specifically how many pending records represent Veterans who applied for health care benefits or when they may have applied. This was because of data weaknesses within our system which we are working hard to improve. The VA OIG report further determined that many of the 867,000 records coded as pending do not represent Veterans actively seeking enrollment in VA health care.

After blaming the OIG for taking the VA’s own numbers too seriously, Murphy’s ire shifts towards the military veterans themselves who are trying to use their veterans benefits.

VA currently has no authority to move records from a pending status even after VA attempts to contact a Veteran, and the Veteran has not provided financial information or military records required by law to determine eligibility.

Remember, this is the same VA that is currently bragging that it has decreased its backlog of pending claims to sustainable levels for the first time in years.

There’s no doubt on either side that the VA needs to get better in order to help military veterans, and this blame game isn’t helping. If the VA was as dedicated to improving its system as Murphy claims, maybe it’s time to start fixing the problem instead of pointing fingers.