Military veterans are swamping the U.S. government with dubious disability claims — including cases of brazen fraud totaling tens of millions of dollars — that are exploiting the country’s sacred commitment to compensate those harmed in the line of duty, according to a Washington Post investigation.

Taxpayers will spend roughly $193 billion this year for the Department of Veterans Affairs to compensate about 6.9 million disabled veterans on the presumption that their ability to work is impaired. VA officials say most veterans’ disability claims are legitimate.

Yet The Post found that millions of the claims are for minor or treatable afflictions that rarely hinder employment, such as hair loss, jock itch and toenail fungus.

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The Post analyzed 25 years of government data on disability claims and sued VA and the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act, forcing the agencies to disclose thousands of pages of internal records and dozens of surveillance videos. The Post also interviewed scores of current and former U.S. officials and visited military bases around the country to speak with veterans. The investigation exposed an increasingly costly disability program prone to rampant exaggeration and fraud, which make it harder for veterans with legitimate claims to get their benefits processed. Bipartisan political indifference and a weak array of checks and balances have compounded the dysfunction.

Veterans’ advocates, for-profit companies and VA itself encourage vets to file as many claims as possible to milk the system. The documents and data obtained by The Post spotlighted other obvious signs of waste and abuse, as well as an internal awareness and tolerance of such problems.

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The easy-to-manipulate regulations have turned the disability program into a rich target for con artists, who are typically prosecuted only in the most egregious and flagrant cases.

Last year, a grand jury indicted an Army veteran on charges of conspiring to defraud the government of $1.1 million by pretending to be paralyzed. According to prosecutors, she spent some of the money on Caribbean vacations and gambling jaunts to Las Vegas. She has pleaded not guilty. In June, a Vietnam War veteran pleaded guilty to ripping off VA by claiming to be blind for 29 years. In fact, he could see well enough to drive and repeatedly renewed his license. The Justice Department said he defrauded taxpayers of nearly $1.2 million.

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The current disability program was designed 80 years ago to provide a safety net for unemployable veterans wounded or injured during World War II. Today, the vast majority of disabled veterans under age 65 still work and collect paychecks from full-time jobs, records show.

According to the most recent available figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for disabled veterans last year was 4.1 percent, about the same as the population at large. In 2023, more than 100,000 disabled veterans — roughly 1 in 60 — reported an income of $250,000 or higher, according to a Post analysis of VA and census data

Other public disability programs help only people who certify that they are incapacitated or severely impaired in their ability to work. The Social Security Administration, which provides disability aid to more than 15 million people, limits benefits to those who cannot hold a job or are unable to earn more than $19,440 a year.

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In interviews, several former claims processors and health care providers said that VA leaders have ignored systemic waste and fraud in the disability program since the George W. Bush administration because they fear the political consequences that would result if they scrutinized claims more closely.

“If you’re a politician and you go against veterans and say we shouldn’t be funding them as much, you’re pretty much committing political suicide,” said Shea Wilkes, an Army veteran who is a clinical social worker at the VA hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Nobody likes claims being denied and the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero, because too much skepticism means more legitimate claims will be denied. But this sounds like a pretty bad loophole.