VA now has ‘100% visibility’ into its software license inventory, official says

The Department of Veterans Affairs now has a complete roster of its software licenses and is working to create a centralized data repository to manage its purchases, VA officials told lawmakers on Monday. 

VA, like many other agencies across the federal government, has faced challenges overseeing its software licenses in recent years. The Government Accountability Office included agencies’ management of software licenses on its recent high-risk list published in February, with watchdog officials similarly identifying concerns about VA’s ability to track and review purchased software licenses. 

During a House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization hearing, GAO’s Director of Information Technology and Cybersecurity Issues Carol Harris said previous reviews of the agency found, in part, that VA officials “could not demonstrate that they were tracking the appropriate number of licenses for each item of software currently in use.”

Harris noted that VA plans to spend $985 million in fiscal year 2025 on software, which includes commercial software licenses. 

In March, Federal Chief Information Officer Gregory Barbaccia asked agencies to provide him with inventories of their licenses with the five software vendors earning the most from federal contracts, along with a “full inventory of all software licenses and associated contracts,” according to reporting from FedScoop.

Rep. Tom Barrett, R-Mich., who chairs the House panel, said he reviewed VA’s response and “for tens of millions of dollars’ worth of licenses, VA wrote that the license usage and quantities were ‘unknown.’”

Barrett also noted that VA was supposed to submit its full inventory of software licenses by the end of April but said “I still haven’t seen it.”

VA officials, however, highlighted the progress they have made in addressing GAO’s concerns and cataloging their entire slate of software licenses. 

Jeff VanBemmel, director of end user operations at VA’s Office of Information and Technology, said the department now has “100% visibility” into its total inventory of software licenses, which includes 4,433 commercial off-the-shelf products and another 224 software-as-a-service offerings. 

He added that the remaining gaps in the inventory requested by the federal CIO “are not on the identification of software or even the licenses in use, but it's really down to who owns the software in VA, who is the person accountable for that license.”

“That really is the work that we have going forward, to identify the accountable person for every software title, and then, you know, working with that requirements owner on the way ahead for their product,” VanBemmel said.

VA has also moved to close gaps in its acquisition processes that allowed software licenses to be procured without any centralized review, including updating department directives. Harris said VA is moving to implement “a centralized approach to ensure software is tracked throughout the entire life cycle,” which would provide it with more insights into the use of these services.

VanBemmel said, however, that addressing software license use can sometimes be difficult, since some internal teams and medical facilities prefer to use different versions of the same basic tools. He noted that some personnel, such as VA's legal community, prefer to use Zoom; across the federal government, meanwhile, Microsoft Teams is the preferred video conferencing platform.

“I think the bigger issue that we have in terms of redundancy is not duplicative software, but in a software category,” VanBemmel said. “We have four or five titles that do the same types of things, just in a different way. And then the question would be, ‘What is the best value for VA in terms of reducing those four or five titles to say, one or two different options?’ That's the work that we have ahead of us.”