April 1, 2025: VA disability contract exam companies fire half their contractors (after the VA requires them to document how long each exam takes on their DBQ forms with time in and time out entries)
April 1, 2025: VA disability contract exam companies fire half their contractors (after the VA requires them to document how long each exam takes on their DBQ forms with time in and time out entries)
April 1, 2025: The VA disability contract exam companies announced that they will be firing half their contract examiners today, April 1, after the VA announced that they will require Compensation and Pension examiners to document the exact time they started seeing a Veteran and the exact time they stopped seeing a Veteran for an exam. They would also include a mechanism to ask the Veteran if these time in and time out times reported by the examiner were accurate. A spokesperson for a third party contract company, who wished to remain anonymous, commented “we knew they were billing for examinations but only seeing the Veteran long enough to give them a handshake and a pat on the ass out the door, but the fact that it will now be documented more visibly opens us up to litigation and losing our contracts. If the VA is going to make us do this, we’ll need to fire half of our contract examiners.”
In the case of psychologists, very brief exams are definitely not consistent with the standards in the field for a disability-related psychological evaluation. In relation to psychologists, when applicable the contract companies noted they would be advising Veterans to consider filing complaints with the state psychology boards where the contract examiner was licensed as the contract examiner was potentially in violation of the APA ethics code and their Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychology. It turns out the fact that VA contracting companies don’t pay well is not an excuse for not performing a disability examination that meets the standards in the field.
As a result of this recent move, the VBA will now also require VA examiners, including those from contract companies, to document the exact time they began speaking with the Veteran for an interview and the exact time they stopped speaking with the Veteran in their interview on the DBQ form if they say an exam was performed. There is no excuse for these government contractors not to do this. Even in psychotherapy documenting EXACT times in the records are required by payors such as Medicare, for example.
The VA’s OIG has noted their concerns about DBQ fraud from private providers in the past. In a stunning twist, the OIG has now also noted concerns about fraudulent third party contract mills where the examiner does not see the Veteran for anything close to the expected amount of time it should take to perform an adequate examination. On April 1 they announced that they are going to be scrutinizing third party VA contract exam factories even more closely. The OIG noted, on April 1, that they are providing a recommendation to the VA that all DBQ’s have a space to track the times these contract companies say they are seeing the Veteran for– noting the exact time they began being seen and the exact time they stopped having direct contact with the Veteran– the VA could then compare this to when these VA third party contract examiners say they saw other Veterans that same day; it could also influence the behaviors of third party contract examiners and help reviewers understand how adequate a contract exam might be (for example a less than 5 minute contract psychological evaluation is not the same thing as a much longer private psychological evaluation). We’ll see how this new April Fool’s Day effort from the VA proceeds.
Happy April Fool’s Day (the post above is of course satire). Yes, I wrote about essentially the same thing last year on April 1 here: VA changes mental health C&P exam duration estimate from 2 to 4 hours to 2 to 4 minutes – Psychology DOT News
You can see my prior April 1 posts from years past here: Past April Fool’s Satire posts from Dr. Finnerty
One thing that isn’t an April Fool’s exaggeration- I have often had free consultation phone calls with Veterans that, according to the Veteran, are longer than their contract C&P exam lasted for psychological issues. My free consultation phone call was longer than their C&P exam (so in these instances even before I started the exam, I presumably had already spent more time with them than the contract examiner had).
Thanks,
Todd Finnerty, Psy.D.
Do you know a Veteran that could use an independent opinion on their VA disability claim? Feel free to send them to my website NexusLetters.com