Supplemental Review of VHA Recruitment, Relocation, and Retention Incentive Service Obligations

This report presents the results of the VA OIG’s supplemental review of service obligations for VHA’s recruitment, relocation, and retention incentives, which follows on a report published in June 2025. While completing that audit, the OIG team became aware of an issue occurring when some VA employees breached their required service obligations. Accordingly, the OIG initiated this supplemental review to determine whether VA issued debt notices for these employees.

Regional human resources staff could not consistently provide evidence that debt notices were initiated or issued to employees who breached an incentive service agreement. The breach of service obligation periods ranged from about one month to one and a half years. During FYs 2020–2023, VA did not initiate debt notices to at least 1,100 employees who moved to another region or left VA before fulfilling their agreements, resulting in VHA paying about $17.5 million for the breached service obligations. This occurred because regional human resources officials did not always accurately enter data into HR Smart, VA’s personnel system of record, and pop-up notifications in this system did not prevent staff from processing personnel actions even when service obligations would be breached. Furthermore, regional officials could not access personnel records when an employee left their network and, therefore, could not determine whether such employees met the required service obligations. VA concurred with all eight recommendations from the June 2025 report and the four new recommendations in this report and has taken action to improve how it governs the recruitment, relocation, and retention incentive process.