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Posted on 04/13/2026 3:27:17 PM PDT by algore
A federal spending watchdog has found the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) faced "challenges" in understanding the correct number of licenses it should hold for the top five vendors in its $985 million annual software expenditure.
In a report [PDF] published last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that "while the VA identified its five most widely used software vendors with the highest quantity of licenses installed, it faced challenges in determining whether it was purchasing too many or too few of these software licenses."
The GAO said that for fiscal 2025, the VA planned to spend about $985 million on software, including commercial software licenses.
In 2015, the GAO identified "the management of software licenses as a focus area" for the VA in a high-risk report.
Another GAO report in January 2024 said the VA should track licenses in use within its inventories and compare them with purchase records.
The VA agreed with the recommendations and – as the latest report states – had taken "preliminary actions" to track software license usage and was due to implement initial functionality for a centralized software license inventory in late March 2026.
"If successful, this could be a critical first step in improving the department's ability to track and analyze licenses across the department. Implementation of these recommendations would allow VA to identify opportunities to reduce costs on duplicate or unnecessary licenses," it said.
Before that system went live, the GAO remained concerned that "VA was not tracking the appropriate number of licenses for each item of software currently in use."
The GAO notes the VA "did not compare inventories of software licenses that were currently in use to purchase records on a regular basis."
The GAO was also concerned with "restrictive software licensing practices" from vendors, which it defined as "any software licensing agreements or vendor processes that limit, impede, or prevent agency efforts to use software in cloud computing."
The GAO has tracked progress on this issue since an earlier report in November 2024. It found restrictive software licensing practices affected federal agencies' cloud computing efforts, including those of VA.
"These practices either increased costs of cloud software or services or limited the department's options when selecting cloud service providers. VA had not established guidance for effectively managing impacts from restrictive practices for cloud computing or determined who is responsible for managing these impacts," it said.
The GAO said that "fully assessing software licenses and effectively managing impacts from restrictive licensing practices at VA is an issue of vital importance."
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Microsoft, VMware and Red Hat (IBM) do a phenomenally good job of making software and service licensing phenomenally complex.
I worked on a government project years ago that partly involved SW purchases. Mostly it was a development project and no one really had a job of managing commercial software licenses. It went sort of like this:
We need need at least 10 licenses of SW product ABC.
OK. Let’s plan for the future, and buy 100 licenses.
6 months pass.
Hey, do we have any software licenses for product ABC? We’re going to need at least 10 of them.
OK. Let’s plan for the future, and buy 100 licenses.
6 months pass.
Hey, do we have any software licenses for product ABC? We’re going to need at least 10 of them.
...
Hey!!!!! How come we have 500 licenses for SW product ABC??? And we’re only using 8 of them!
No wonder logging in to MyHeathEVet is such a jug-f**k.
Is almost every government employee a moron?
Or is the total lack of any oversight?
How much to we waste on AGs, IGs and the GAO?
I did weapon system acquisition for almost 30 years. You would be amazed. I was a contractor — the contractors do the technical work. The government civilians are in charge of everything. They are the bureaucrats. They have 100% of the authority and the responsibility. They do not understand much of anything having to do with real world or technical matters. Contractors are known as “scummy contractors” and are not allowed to have opinions or input. I saw a lot of wild stuff. Everything I worked on was pretty much pie-in-the-sky cutting edge technology, so a high failure rate is not too surprising, but in 30 years, I believe I worked on exactly one project that finished successfully. It all just felt like a money game to me. The people in charge didn’t know what they were doing, they understood that they didn’t know what they were doing, and they didn’t care.
No profit incentive.
Like Ray Stanz told Peter Venkman, “I’ve worked in private sector. They expect results.”
"We need to onboard so and so. They need A, B, and C."
It turns out they needed A but would never use B and C. Their own bosses didn't know what their own staff needed.
The line that drove me nuts, "They told me I needed it." No, you were never going to need it and the damn license is $5k per year per user.
We had some software that I fought to have zero licenses because no one had been doing the work in house for years. The subconsultants already had their licenses, and usually the newest versions. "Yeah, but we should have it also." (Like having a set of plumber's tools because your plumber has them).
I can tell horror stories about programs and users still using .doc and .xls files that were superseded by .docx and .xlsx in 2007, and it wasn't holdovers from back then. This was new programming from turd world "programmers" kicking the outputs to old file extensions, and then sourcing those files for other reports and such. Like nothing I had ever seen.
I've also seen the reverse: 60 users can't get into their system after some clown shut down the license renewal because the clown couldn't see it installed on any machine, oblivious that their technicians installed it on virtual devices.
And the defense contractors (the big companies) understand this very well. If they fail to meet technical requirements, or fall behind schedule as the contract is expiring, they just get a contract renewal with more time and money. It's a game. Doing excellent work on time and under budget gets them nothing. Screwing up in a big way gets them a whole lot of money.
On one project, those of us on the government side were getting ready for a major test event the following week. Lots of people, lots of effort. It was a major milestone. Then the Defense company called the government and said that they couldn't meet that deadline, and they wouldn't be able to test the following week.
Okay. Push it off a week? No. Push it off two weeks? No. They needed 6 months. They told us this 3 work days before the testing was supposed to start. Like the need for the 6 month delay had just occurred to them. This required a whole new contract. They got $50M because they screwed up the schedule. They know how this game is played.
Private industry can't do that stuff. Not at all.
If Republicans acted like Republicans it might not happen.
I laugh at all the fraud we are finding. All funded by Republicans and Democrats.
CR after CR.
I’m sick of wearing a hazmat suit when I vote.
Meanwhile, there are very easy scripts for PowerShell that can tell you every piece of software installed on every computer in your network.
Sounds like Oracle and/or VM
Especially after they put it on VA.gov. Before they moved to VA.org, it was actually a usable system. Email, refills etc. Now it just contributes to the suicide thoughts.
I believe this.
It’s has to keep track of software licenses for the 3 or 4 computers in our house.
VA must have hundreds or thousands.
This was at least 10 years ago the last company I worked at was stung by Microsoft Windows & Office license fees and penalties and Adobe image software that was bundled on scanners the company bought. They just needed the scanning capability and the Adobe software was not used. It cost the company millions in penalties.
The VA is a disaster...I’m coming up on 6 years this July on a disability claim which was granted in January of this year but hasn’t been settled yet. They’ve closed the claim without settling it, reopened it, sent a letter to me on 11 March which I’ve never received or have seen and no one at the VA can tell me what the letter says or final disability is. Asinine.
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