A federal watchdog review released September 24, 2026, found that veterans who asked the Department of Veterans Affairs to pay for medical care outside its own hospitals waited an average of about 12 days to learn whether that request was approved. VA’s own rule calls for that decision within three business days. The Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General reviewed close to 2.6 million of these community care requests filed between October 2024 and January 2026, and found only about 1.2 million were decided within the required window.
Inside the VA OIG’s 2.6 million-request audit
The audit, report number 25-03946-211, covered every community care request VA received from October 1, 2024, through January 31, 2026, a stretch of roughly 16 months. Investigators found that veterans got a timely answer on only about 46 percent of those requests, meaning most ran past the three-business-day standard, which the audit ties to the 2018 MISSION Act, the law that expanded veterans’ access to non-VA providers.
Of the roughly 1.4 million requests that produced a formal notification during the review window, the average wait was about 12 days from the date VA received the request, four times longer than the three-business-day standard allows. Some of those requests never generated a timely notification at all, which is part of why the total requests reviewed run higher than the number that were both processed and answered on schedule. The underlying findings are laid out in full in the complete report, which the inspector general’s office posted alongside the summary page the same day.
Where a wait like this shows up next: The community care backlog the audit describes runs through VA’s medical side, but a VA pension or Aid & Attendance claim moves through a separate office on its own clock, with no public status page to check while it sits — exactly the gap a claim tracker is built to close in The Veterans Benefits Action Kit.
A separate rule sets how long the appointment itself can wait
The three-business-day figure the audit measured covers only how fast VA has to tell a veteran whether a request is approved, not how long the veteran then waits for the actual appointment. A different regulation, 38 CFR 17.4040, sets that separate clock: no more than a 30-minute drive and 20 days for primary care, mental health and extended care, and no more than a 60-minute drive and 28 days for specialty care. A veteran who waits 12 days just to hear whether VA will pay is already well into that appointment window before a single visit gets booked, leaving considerably less runway to actually see a provider inside the standard’s own deadline.
What community care is supposed to guarantee
Community care lets a veteran get treatment from a private provider, paid for by VA, when VA itself cannot deliver the needed care within those same distance and time limits. Under VA’s own description of the program, a veteran generally needs VA’s authorization before a community appointment can happen, and whether that authorization comes through depends on the specific need and circumstances rather than being automatic. That makes the request-and-decision step the audit measured more than paperwork. It is the gate a veteran has to pass through before an outside provider can be scheduled and paid, and the MISSION Act’s three-business-day promise exists specifically so that gate does not become its own source of delay.
What the wait can cost a household budget
Because authorization has to come first, the days spent waiting on VA’s decision are days a veteran cannot yet lock in the outside appointment the request was filed for. A household planning around a medical need such as a specialist visit, physical therapy or a diagnostic scan has to build the audit’s roughly 12-day answer time into its own scheduling, on top of whatever wait the community provider’s own calendar adds, rather than the three business days VA’s standard promises. For care that cannot simply wait, that gap is what pushes some veterans toward paying out of pocket and sorting out reimbursement later, rather than sitting on an authorization that is running four times longer than it should, and reimbursement claims filed after the fact carry their own separate paperwork and their own separate waiting period.
Why the answers took so long
The audit attributes the delay to ordinary operational strain rather than any single cause: processing backlogs, staff shortages and continued reliance on manual steps rather than automated ones. Investigators also pointed to community care requests moving through multiple separate systems that require coordination among VA staff, along with inconsistent oversight of how those systems are used and inconsistent data entry along the way. A request that has to pass through several hand-offs between a referring VA facility, a scheduling team and an outside network administrator has more places for a delay to start, and fewer built-in checks to catch one once it has.
Six recommendations, none of them closed yet
VA OIG issued six recommendations meant to speed up the referral and notification process, and as of the report’s release every one of them remained open, meaning VA had not yet finished the corrective steps investigators called for. The audit does not set a deadline for closing them, so there is no fixed date by which the three-business-day standard is expected to actually govern most requests, and no guarantee the 12-day average will move before the next review.
The Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General posted the full audit on September 24, 2026, and it stands as the government’s own most current accounting of how long veterans are waiting to learn whether their outside care will be paid for.
Veterans’ benefits run on their own separate clocks
The community care delays this audit measured sit inside VA’s medical system, but veterans navigating VA pension and Aid & Attendance benefits deal with a second, largely separate process, one with its own paperwork and its own backlog risk. Filing that pension claim carries no fee, which is exactly the point pension poachers count on families not knowing.
The Veterans Benefits Action Kit lays out the three VA pension levels, including Aid & Attendance, alongside the steps for filing for free with VA Form 21P-527EZ, giving a veteran or their family a clear picture of what a claim should cost and where a submitted one stands.
See the pension-poacher warning signs and the claim tracker in The Veterans Benefits Action Kit.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Every figure above links to the primary source it came from.
