The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has run up more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer-funded cost overruns to construct new VA medical centers and is getting sued for failing to pay contractors for their work, The Daily Caller has learned.
The growing problem will be highlighted Tuesday at a U.S. House Committee on Veterans Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigations hearing at the state capitol building in Denver, Colorado. (RELATED: VA employees destroyed veterans’ records to cancel backlogged exam requests)
The construction of the replacement VA Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado has resulted in over a year of delays, with cost overruns totaling more than $470 million, and multiple lawsuits alleging that VA failed to pay contractors that worked on the project.
But the problems are not limited to Aurora.
An April 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report obtained by TheDC found that four VA medical center construction projects — in Colorado, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Orlando — had to that point racked up nearly $1.5 billion in cost overruns, with an average of $366 million in additional costs charged to taxpayers for each facility.
But the VA awarded $54,000 in bonuses to Glenn Haggstrom, its official overseeing construction.