Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Notable

Conduct an independent audit of the VA modeled on the 2018 DOD audit

Not started

646 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Conduct an independent audit of the VA similar to the 2018 Department of Defense (DOD) audit to identify IT, management, financial, contracting, and other deficiencies.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No enterprise-wide independent audit on the model of the Department of Defense’s 2018 first full audit was commissioned. What did happen is the recurring audit VA already has: Kearney & Company’s independent audit of VA’s FY 2025 financial statements, required by section 304 of the Chief Financial Officers Act, signed 2026-01-16 and published in the FY 2025 Agency Financial Report. It gave an unmodified opinion and identified two material weaknesses — information technology internal controls and internal use software — which covers part of the IT and financial ground the Quote names but is neither new nor the management-and-contracting sweep it describes. The closest in-window departmental exercises are the March 2025 termination of 585 contracts after a contract review and the Inspector General and GAO governance reviews VA cited when it launched the VHA reorganization; neither is an audit of the department. Re-measured on 2026-09-06 against the Inspector General's own report index, filtered to report type "Audit" and to agency-wide scope over the window: twenty-one audits, every one of them program- or system-specific — healthcare enrollment, the Toxic Exposures Fund, the Benefits Enterprise Platform, the FY2025 FISMA audit, education compliance surveys, the Patient Advocate Tracking System-Replacement, pharmaceutical purchases outside the prime vendor contract, consult timeliness, community care eligibility, police staffing, outpatient clinic contracts, financial and acquisition system access controls, homeless screening, funding-fee refunds, journal vouchers, clinical resource hub productivity and nonexpendable equipment. The only enterprise-scope item on the list is "Audit of VA's Financial Statements for Fiscal Year 2025" (report 25-01268-16, 2026-01-27), which is the OIG's transmittal of the same recurring Kearney & Company CFO Act audit already cited here. Nothing on the model of the 2018 DOD first-ever full-scope audit was commissioned.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Judgment call and negative search, 2026-09-01:

  • The alternative reading is pre_satisfied: true — VA has been audited by an independent public accountant every year since the CFO Act, so on a literal reading of “conduct an independent audit of the VA … to identify IT, management, financial, contracting, and other deficiencies” the ask was satisfied before the window opened. It is left at not started because the Quote’s comparator is the 2018 DOD audit, a one-off first-ever full-scope audit of an unaudited department, and VA’s annual financial-statement audit is neither one-off nor of that scope. Raised as a boundary row in the spot-check register.
  • Federal Register API, conditions[agencies][]=veterans-affairs-department from 2025-01-20, all types, read by title — no audit commission, charter or notice.
  • news.va.gov press-release search audit — one hit, https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-to-terminate-585-non-mission-critical-or-duplicative-contracts/ (2025-03-03), a contract review rather than an audit.
  • The FY 2025 Agency Financial Report PDF was downloaded and read (pdftotext -layout) before it was cited: Independent Auditor’s Report at p. 91, unmodified opinion, two material weaknesses, signed by Kearney & Company at Alexandria, Virginia on 2026-01-16.
  • Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. The OIG report index is reachable — vaoig.gov/reports 404s but vaoig.gov/reports/all is an exposed view with working filters (see #1785’s notes for the parameter names). Filtering to field_report_type[]=106 (Audit) and field_agency_wide=1 over 01/20/2025–09/06/2026 enumerates the twenty-one audits listed in the Status note. This turns the negative from “no audit commission, charter or notice was found in the Federal Register” into a read of the actual audit output, which is the stronger claim §3b asks for when an agency runs programs with no Federal Register trace.
Action
create
Object
Independent audit of the VA
ID
1768