dr. michael shepard, senior physician in the igs office of health care inspections. also from the office of inspector general, we have ms. linda halladay, assistant inspector general for audits and evaluations accompanied by dr. larry rinkmeyer. and next we will hear from nick totally enteeno, navy veteran of the iraq war and former mental health administrator officer in the v.a. and finally the founder and executive director of outdoor odyssey, retired major general thomas jones. mr. shownhart, we will begin with your testimony. we have a lot of answers we need from you. so please begin.

dr. michael shepard, a senior physician in the office of health care inspections, and mr. larry rinkmeyer, director of the kansas city office audit. our review found that inaccuracies in data diminish the usability of information needed to fully assess current capacity, resource distribution and productivity across the v.a. system. in fiscal year 2011 and the perfo performance accountability report, 95% of first time patients received a full mental health evaluation within 14 days. however, we concluded that 14-day reported measure has no real value as an access to care measure, because vha measured how long it took to conduct the mental health evaluation, not how long the patient waited to receive that evaluation. we calculated the number of days between the first time the patients contacted and we projected only 49% or approximately 184,000 of these evaluations within 14 days. of either the veteran's request or a referral from mental health care. on average, it took vha about 50 days to provide the remaining patients their full evaluation. once vha provides the patient w