  In the analysis of VERITAS and other IACT data, it is expected to get a
distribution of statistical significances in sky map bins with mean of zero and
width of unity in the absence of a $\gamma$-ray signal. However, it is not
uncommon to see significance distributions of width greater than unity,
indicating that the background is poorly estimated and the significances in the
region of interest are incorrect. This work explores the origins of these wider
significance distributions and develop solutions to this issue and test these
solutions on samples of VERITAS data.
