Veterans Affairs Purchase Card Misuse Mitigation Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 5215, the Veterans Affairs Purchase Card Mitigation Act.

I have often said I am the VA's staunchest supporter, but I will be their harshest critic. On this one, I will be their harshest critic.

Time and again when we hear reports of VA employees misusing purchase cards, that cannot stand. Every dollar that is misused, whether it is through fraud, waste, or abuse, is one less dollar that is not being used towards veterans, and it is the taxpayers' dollars that need to be guarded. This misuse erodes Congress' ability to oversee the VA budget and the use of the money.

Employees who misuse purchase cards should be held accountable and should be prevented from being a purchase card holder or authorizing official, because they can't be trusted to follow the regulations or be good stewards of taxpayer dollars.

This legislation will ensure that taxpayer dollars are protected from purchase card misuse. If you are doing it right, you can still use the card and it can serve veterans. If you choose to ignore the rules, you are not going to be able to do it anymore.

It is pretty simple. It is a smart piece of legislation. I urge its passage.

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Mr. WALZ. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire of the gentleman whether he has any further speakers.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to note, on this, there are other issues at hand here. There are certainly some of these cases where people are just blatantly misusing them. That is a small percentage. The vast majority is of leadership not implementing policies. Especially we were talking about the medical-surgical supply formulary, and people are taking the shortcut to getting things instead of getting--we had this conversation on contracts and the way it should be done.

The part about this is it isn't somebody going out and buying themselves a new phone or something; it is them going out and buying things that are actually going to be used, but it is a stupid way to do it because we end up paying more money. We don't have certain contracts. It is just is not the way to budget.

So I think this has a lot of really good things that it can do. One of them that it should continue to do is force VA leadership to have a better plan in place. We see it right here in the D.C. VA, not having this supply management piece down right.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage support of this piece of legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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