Over 50% Error Rate Found in Military Sexual Trauma Claims Processing, with MST Claims Denied at 1.5x the Rate of Combat PTSD Claims

A VA Office of Inspector General audit of military sexual trauma (MST) disability claims processed between October 2023 and January 2024 found an error rate exceeding 50%, with errors including failure to obtain all relevant records, insufficient medical opinions that missed key evidence, and failure to order required medical examinations. Historically, MST-related PTSD claims are denied at a rate of 27.6% compared to 18.2% for combat-related PTSD claims. Male veterans filing MST claims face 1.78 times higher odds of denial compared to female veterans. The VA received 57,400 MST claims in fiscal year 2024, an 18% increase from the prior year, amplifying the impact of these systematic processing failures. Why it matters: More than half of MST claims are processed with material errors, so veterans who survived sexual assault during military service are wrongly denied compensation for resulting PTSD, depression, and anxiety, so survivors who already overcame enormous stigma barriers to file a claim are re-traumatized by institutional rejection of their experience, so many give up on the VA system entirely and lose access to specialized MST therapy and financial support, so the cycle of untreated trauma, substance abuse, and suicide risk intensifies for one of the most vulnerable veteran subpopulations. The structural root cause is that the VA cannot retain experienced claims processors with the specialized training required to evaluate MST evidence (which relies on behavioral markers and corroborating indicators rather than combat records), creating chronic turnover in a role that demands nuanced clinical judgment, and resulting in undertrained examiners applying the simpler evidentiary standards of combat PTSD to fundamentally different MST cases.