VA watchdog finds nearly a million calls from vets seeking care had key tracking data missing

By Brian Todd, CNN

(CNN) — The wife of one veteran wanted her husband to be evaluated, fearing his cancer may have spread, and sought a radiology appointment last year with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

She made “multiple phone calls that went to voicemail,” last March and received “no follow-up within the promised 24 hours,” according to the VA’s chief watchdog.

That incident is just one documented by investigators with the VA’s inspector general’s office who are trying to get to the bottom of a longstanding complaint from the nation’s veterans: They can’t get through to their health care providers on the phone.

The VA watchdog also discovered other cases when veterans were forced “to drive to facilities in person” for answers when they could not reach VA staff to schedule or change appointments. In fact, the inspector general’s office observed this “firsthand during site visits at VA facilities in Miami, Florida and Washington, D.C., where veterans told VA staff about their experiences.”

But there’s another problem – the Department of Veterans Affairs has a hard time of determining the scope of the problem.

The inspector general’s office, in a new preliminary advisory report, says it found that 13 of 15 VA medical facilities it sampled didn’t have key data tracking patient calls.

The report found the 13 facilities didn’t track what happened with nearly 1 million of the 2.1 million call attempts by veterans seeking specialized care over a 12-month period ending on July 31, 2025 – a time period that spans the Biden and Trump administrations.

Many of the untracked calls were at VA clinics where patients seek radiology and mental health care. The report noted that those are patients who “are at high risk of adverse health outcomes.”

Veterans trying to access care at those facilities “reported that they faced delays, uncertainty and frustration,” the report says.

Several veteran advocacy groups called for the VA to address the issue.

“The VA must ensure veterans can reliably and promptly make direct contact with specialty care clinics, receive clear guidance and secure the care they need,” said Jon Retzer, national legislative director for the group Disabled American Veterans.

When asked for comment, VA press secretary Peter Kasperowicz said in a statement to CNN: “We appreciate the inspector general’s review, which highlights issues dating back to July 2024 during the Biden administration.”

Kasperowicz said the VA under the Trump administration it has reduced the backlog of veterans waiting for benefits, adding, “We look forward to working with the inspector general to vastly improve VA’s phone-based customer service and better track these efforts.”

According to the watchdog report, the facilities didn’t track how many calls were answered or how many callers hung up before anyone answered, and they didn’t have information on average wait times.

The failure to track those calls makes it “difficult to determine whether veterans reached specialty care clinics quickly and easily,” the report said.

The watchdog said its audit focused on call operations for six specialties — audiology, dental, mental health, optometry, podiatry, and radiology — at the  selected facilities.

Leaders at those 13 facilities “had no oversight of call performance for 49 of their 78 clinics,” according to the report.

Kyleanne Hunter, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, called for better tracking and more transparency. “Tracking data is how the VA improves its processes to ensure veterans’ needs are met in a timely manner,” she said.

The VA watchdog issued the advisory ahead of its full report with recommendations, which it expects to release by this summer.

The inspector general’s office told CNN in a statement that “this information is meant to increase the VA’s awareness of inconsistencies across facilities with respect to specialty care calls.”

In 2023, the VA sought to get a more comprehensive measure of its call response performance, directing its medical facilities to collect and analyze that data on an ongoing basis. It set a standard of answering at least 80% of calls within 30 seconds and allowing only 5% or fewer calls to go unanswered before callers hung up.

It’s unclear whether the VA is meeting those goals because the report says the agency lacks the tools necessary to measure its performance.

The inspector general’s report says “a VA Office of Information and Technology official confirmed that VA lacks a system to capture call performance data for specialty clinics that use individual or shared phone lines,” and in many cases has no plans to fix the systems, something the preliminary report says “may prevent leaders from identifying problems or taking corrective action to ensure timely, seamless care.”

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