WASHINGTON — Cost overruns of more than $1 billion at the Veterans Affairs hospital under construction in Aurora were the fault of agency officials who ignored repeated warnings about its price and went ahead with plans to build a medical campus that one consultant compared to a shopping mall, according to an investigation made public Wednesday.

The 82-page report, by the internal watchdog at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, identifies several instances in which VA leaders turned a blind eye toward problems with the new facility, which won’t be finished before January 2018.

And even then it won’t be ready. The VA estimates the nearly $1.7 billion facility — once expected to cost $604 million — will need at least six more months and another $315 million before it will have the furniture and equipment it requires.

“This means veterans will not likely be served by a fully functioning facility before mid-to-late 2018 or almost 20 years after VA identified the need to replace and expand its aging facility in Denver,” noted investigators with the VA Office of Inspector General.

Furthermore, the authors wrote that Glenn Haggstrom, the VA construction chief at the time, knew the project was “moving toward significantly exceeding the budget” but that he did not “share this information with Congress” when called to testify in May 2013 and April 2014.

That finding drew the ire of Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado.

“Here’s a guy who should be investigated by law enforcement on whether he committed perjury,” Gardner said. “His lies cost the taxpayers of this country hundreds of millions of dollars.”

According to investigators, one root cause of the roughly $1.1 billion price hike was a design that often sacrificed affordability in the name of aesthetics.

Specifically, the report placed blame on the decision to build a narrow, 1,100-foot concourse through the center of the complex like a human spine, connecting with other campus buildings as if they were limbs.

The design team explained the idea was “that no one has to spend an entire workday out of reasonable proximity to a window,” according to the report.

But investigators said the idea backfired on the so-called Joint Venture Team, or JVT, which they identified as the firms Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, S.A. Miro Inc., Cator, Ruma and Associates, and H+L Architecture (now, after a merger, called TreanorHL).

Not only did this feature see its own cost rise, from $81.4 million in 2011 to $120.7 million in 2015, but investigators said the VA was warned by one of its consultants, Jacobs Engineering Group, about the high cost of this approach.

“A Jacobs official told the former VA Denver project executive that the layout of the hospital was unusual, more closely resembling a shopping mall than a hospital,” according to the report.

In 2011, the firm suggested a simpler approach — one akin to a VA facility in North Las Vegas that cost about $620 million and used tall, attached buildings. That campus is about 1.3 million square feet; Aurora is about 1.2 million square feet.

“However, the Las Vegas facility cost significantly less than the Denver facility, in part, due to the simpler design,” wrote investigators.

The report noted that an unnamed Jacobs employee tried to raise concerns in 2011 about the campus layout but was rebuffed by the agency.

“He stated that the response from VA officials was that it was too late to make sweeping changes to the design,” according to the report.

The findings also flagged several other expensive flourishes. “The JVT’s design included unnecessarily expensive and complicated elements, including the use of underground parking to preserve mountain views, natural lighting and extensive landscaping of garden patios in between and around buildings,” noted investigators.

VA officials told the inspector general that members of the design team often were “both difficult to work with and not cooperative in making necessary design changes to meet the budget.” These same officials speculated the design team resisted changes because it would fund a redesign of the project, rather than the VA.

A spokesman for the design team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even so, investigators said the VA did not do its job.

“Regardless of the difficulty in dealing with the JVT, in our opinion, VA should have enforced the contract provisions” to meet the budget, they wrote.

That was not the only missed opportunity for the VA. In early 2013, the agency was presented with a raft of proposals that could have saved $402 million. These were “mostly rejected by VA, and the few changes that VA agreed to were not incorporated into project designs,” according to the report.

In response to the findings, several lawmakers said the VA must hold more of its employees accountable for a project once dubbed the biggest construction failure in VA history. Haggstrom already has left the agency, with full benefits, as has Phillipa Anderson, who led the legal team that helped write the project’s contract.

But there have been few other repercussions. An internal VA report — which the agency refuses to make public — determined no one else should be punished.

“I will be asking the Department of Justice to determine whether charges are warranted against Haggstrom or others, and I am renewing my call for VA to immediately fire Office of Construction and Facilities Management executive director Stella Fiotes, who has presided over much of the Denver project’s mismanagement yet remains firmly entrenched at the department,” said U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., who chairs the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.

In response to the report, the VA issued a statement that said it already has taken steps to address the problems identified in the report and that it was making “irrefutable progress in ensuring this project gets completed quickly and on budget.”