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GAO-20-537PR 1 (2020-04-20)

handle is hein.gao/gaobaeazw0001 and id is 1 raw text is: c A U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Comptroller General Washington, DC 20548 of the United States April 20, 2020 The Honorable Robert Wilkie Secretary U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 810 Vermont Ave. NW Washington, D.C. 20420 Priority Open Recommendations: Department of Veterans Affairs Dear Mr. Secretary: The purpose of this letter is to provide an update on the overall status of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) implementation of GAO's recommendations and to call your personal attention to areas where open recommendations should be given high priority.1 In November 2019, we reported that on a government-wide basis, 77 percent of our recommendations made 4 years before were implemented.2 As of April 2020, VA's implementation rate for these recommendations was 88 percent. As of April 2020, VA had 227 open recommendations. Fully implementing all open recommendations could significantly improve VA's operations. In our March 2019 letter, we highlighted 30 priority recommendations for your department, and since March 2019, VA has implemented 10 of these recommendations. In doing so, VA improved its ability to provide timely access to health care for veterans, ensured that employees who report wrongdoing are treated fairly and are protected against retaliation, and made progress ensuring timely and accurate processing of veterans' enrollment applications, among other things. In addition to the 10 recommendations that VA has implemented, we closed one priority recommendation as unimplemented and removed the priority designation from another recommendation.3 1Priority recommendations are those that GAO believes warrant priority attention from heads of key departments or agencies. They are highlighted because, upon implementation, they may significantly improve government operation, for example, by realizing large dollar savings; eliminating mismanagement, fraud, and abuse; or making progress toward addressing a high-risk or duplication issue. 2GAO, Performance and Accountability Report.- Fiscal Year 2019 GAO-20-1 -1SP (Washington, D.C.: Nov.9, 2019). 3We closed one priority recommendation as unimplemented because the Office of Management and Budget significantly revised its metrics on data center optimization that we had recommended the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) take action to meet. We replaced this recommendation with a more recent one to take action to meet the revised metrics. (See enclosure.) We removed the priority designation from another recommendation because it became a lower priority after VA provided new information. Specifically, in 2014 we recommended that VA use census tract data to help it make better-informed decisions regarding the location of burial options. In 2019, VA officials provided new information that they make decisions on cemetery locations based in part on the projected, county-level veteran population 30 years in the future. VA officials expressed concern that there would be too much uncertainty trying to perform such long-term population projections at the census tract level. While we removed the priority designation for this recommendation, we continue to maintain the validity of our recommendation and believe that comparing estimates of unserved veterans based on current census tract data with estimates based on current GAO-20-537PR VA Priority Recommendations Page 1

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