Government SANFUs

Here's something I've been following. Apparently there are a lot of VA nurses that are in trouble right now because in order to keep them the VA gave them raises. Now the Feds say that they shouldn't have been given the raises and the nurses need to repay the government. The government is planning on hiring a bunch of temporary workers to figure out how much the nurses were over paid. Usually in real life when a mistake is made, the person who made the mistake is supposed to fix the problem. These nurses had no idea their raises weren't authorized, their supervisors gave them the raises, they didn't steal the money. Luckily it looks like they can file waivers to avoid repayment, which is up to $30,000 in some cases (some of the nurses recieved the raise 8 years ago.) But to me it seems like it would be less expensive to just let them keep the money and lower their salaries!!