Amid Arlington Grave Issues, VA Says Punchbowl Review ‘Not Necessary’
WASHINGTON 鈥斅燗 long-awaited Army released just before Christmas revealed that more than 64,000 grave markers in Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery have possible problems like name misspellings, incorrect dates of birth and death, and inaccurate rank and service branch.
But the federal government says that a similar review at the is “not necessary” because the two cemeteries are managed by different entities.
The Department of the Army maintains Arlington and its approximately 300,000 graves; the Department of Veterans Affairs manages Punchbowl, which is estimated to have the remains of about 35,000 people.
The review at Arlington was last year after system-wide accountability issues were uncovered at the cemetery. The study cost $133,000 to complete, according to the Department of Defense.
Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Josephine Schuda told Civil Beat that the VA’s National Cemetery Administration has “several” safeguards in place “to promote system-wide operational accountability and high standards of customer service” at Punchbowl, which is one of 131 national cemeteries that it operates across 39 states.
Schuda said that cemetery assessment teams from the VA conduct regular site visits to all of the cemeteries it manages. In the meantime, cemeteries like Punchbowl are required to conduct an operational “self assessment” each year to review internments, maintenance and gravesite inventory.
Other safeguards that Schuda described include electronic burial scheduling and tracking, which was adopted in lieu of a paper-based system in the early 1990s.
“VA鈥檚 electronic burial, gravesite mapping and tracking processes greatly reduce the risk of burial errors,” Schuda wrote in an email to Civil Beat.
The electronic system also enables members of the public to use a to research the burial site of any person whose remains are interred in a VA-operated cemetery, Defense Department cemetery or National Park Service cemetery.
