WASHINGTON (AP) – Lawmakers sharply criticized the Veterans Affairs Department on Tuesday about why a national scare over botched colonoscopies earlier this year didn’t prompt stronger safeguards at the agency’s medical centers.

Agency officials apologized for the continued weaknesses and told a House subcommittee they would do better. VA Secretary Eric Shinseki said he would be disciplining staffers.

The strong reaction came as the agency’s inspector general reported that fewer than half of VA facilities selected for surprise inspections last month had proper training and guidelines in place. That was months after the VA launched a nationwide safety campaign over the discovery of errors at facilities in Miami, Augusta, Ga., and Murfreesboro, Tenn., that could have exposed veterans to HIV and other infections.

John Daigh, VA’s assistant inspector general who led the review, said the findings “troubled me greatly.”

“We think there are systemic issues,” Daigh said.

Providing new details on the mistakes found at Miami’s center, for example, the report said workers there didn’t know for almost five years that they should have been sterilizing an irrigation part on an endoscope used for routine colonoscopies. They also weren’t cleaning a water tube between each procedure as recommended by the manufacturer and were mistakenly attaching the water system to the scope during the colonoscopy instead of before, possibly allowing contamination of sterile components.

The errors – all discovered after the hospital reported in January that it was using its equipment properly – illustrate the potential reach of the problem, not just at VA but in the private sector. Hospitals across the country are using different equipment, training and guidelines. Even as equipment changes, many staffers have continued using the same cleaning practices, James Bagian, VA’s chief patient safety officer, said after the hearing.

“You don’t know you’re wrong until you know you’re wrong,” Bagian said when asked if the agency is confident that mistakes were limited to the three states that have reported problems.

In February, the VA began warning about 10,000 former patients in Georgia, Tennessee and Florida – some who had procedures as far back as 2003 – that they may have been exposed to infections. Although the VA says the chance of infection was remote, the patients were advised to get blood tests for HIV and hepatitis.