Tag Archives: Veterans Affairs

More Veterans Administration…Misbehavior

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Department of Veterans Affairs investigators conducted spot checks at 10 veterans benefits offices around the country and came to a disturbing conclusion: the VA has been systemically shredding documents related to veterans’ claims—some potentially affecting their benefits.

The VA Office of Inspector General conducted the surprise audit at 10 regional offices on July 20, 2015, after an investigation into inappropriate shredding in Los Angeles found that staff there was destroying veterans’ mail related to claims….

And

Of 155 claims-related documents [in the to-be-shredded bins], 69 were found to have been incorrectly placed in shred bins at six of the regional offices: Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Reno[.]

For the math challenged senior VA employees, that’s a 44% rate.  That rate is not consistent with mere carelessness.

This is part of a venerable history of misbehaviors that is just too widespread and too long-lasting to be accidental.  Especially against the backdrop of VA management’s refusal to terminate, for cause or for any reason, those at any level who are misbehaving.

It might seem nice that it’s the VA’s own IG facility is the one that’s finding these failures to perform, but maybe that IG is doing so secure in the knowledge that there will be no consequences to the findings.  The VA’s IG, after all, works directly for the VA’s Secretary.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Continuing Veterans Administration Failure

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Kyndra Rotunda, ex-Army JAG and currently Professor of Military & International Law and Executive Director of the Military and Veterans Law Institute at Chapman University, had some comments in her Wall Street Journal op-ed [emphasis in original].

When Congress enacted the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014 in the wake of revelations about bureaucratic dysfunction at the Veterans Affairs Department, the plan was to reduce wait times at VA hospitals, give veterans access to outside health care and allow the VA to quickly terminate problem employees.

How is the VA doing? For starters, government statistics show that hospital wait times are 50% longer than two years ago.

And

The law allows the firing of top-level VA officials with less notice and fewer appellate rights than government employees enjoy. The fired VA worker must appeal within seven days of the discipline; administrative judges must hear and decide the case within 21 days, or the department’s discipline stands; judges cannot mitigate penalties; and decisions are final.
…
Over the past month alone, judges at the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals by federal employees, sided with three VA officials who challenged their disciplining. The MSPB reinstated all three.

Time to get out the axe.

But then Rotunda strayed.

[W]hat’s the harm in allowing judges to mitigate penalties?

In response to which, I ask, “What’s the harm in requiring these administrative judges simply to uphold or set aside the penalty?”  Either the person did the deed, or he did not.  The penalty is not for a third party to decide; the employer—even this wholly mendacious VA of an employer—is the one to determine whether the person’s services are needed any further.

Full stop.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

The Veterans Administration Suspends

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But it chooses, again, not to fire a failed executive.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is suspending the head of the Veterans Benefits Administration for allowing two lower-ranking officials to manipulate the agency’s hiring system for their own gain.

Deputy VA Secretary Sloan Gibson says acting VBA chief Danny Pummill will be suspended without pay for 15 days for his role in a relocation scam that has roiled the agency for months.

Pummill failed to exercise proper oversight as Kimberly Graves and Diana Rubens forced lower-ranking managers to accept job transfers and then stepped into the vacant positions themselves, keeping their senior-level pay while reducing their responsibilities, Gibson said Tuesday.

Suspended.  For two whole weeks.  For defrauding the Veterans Administration and the American taxpayers who are paying these salaries and funding this travesty of a Federal department.

Gibson needs to be terminated, too, and for cause.

Better yet, veteranos administratio delende est.

The VA and the IG

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I’ve disparaged Inspectors General as not being truly independent—they work directly for the boss of the organization they’re presumably inspecting and on which they’re engaging in oversight. I’ve also said that the Secretary of the Veterans Administration should be terminated for cause. Here’s an example of the particularly incestuous relationship between Veterans Administration MFWICs and their IGs and the damage that relationship can do.

A top government watchdog on Thursday accused the central agency tasked with holding Veterans Affairs accountable of dropping the ball—by failing to properly investigate whistleblower claims of secret wait lists at Shreveport, LA, and Chicago hospitals where thousands of veterans languished up to 15 months without care.

Further, Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner said the VA’s Office of Inspector General even tried to “discredit the whistleblowers” who brought the allegations by focusing on a narrow aspect of the case.

And

[T]he focus and tone of the OIG investigations appear to be intended to discredit the whistleblowers by focusing on the word “secret,” rather than reviewing the access to care issues identified by the whistleblowers and in the OSC referrals.

The OSC’s letter and reports can be seen here. (Note: osc.gov is handing out a taking too long to respond error as I schedule this yesterday.  Make of that what you will.)

Veteranos administratio delende est.

A Problem with Veterans Administration Management

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Leo Shane described one aspect of this in his piece in the Military Times. Shane centered his article on Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) role in making it nearly impossible to fire non-performing Veterans Administration executives.

Sanders—the independent Vermont senator who at the time was chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee—insisted on preserving the protection board’s appeals role, and held up reform legislation in his chamber until it was included.

That protection board is the Merit Systems Protection Board, an allegedly independent facility with a degree of judicial authority that supposedly ensures that nobody gets fired without due process. In the realization this Board, which Sanders was so desperate to protect, is a union facility that ensures that nobody gets fired.

The larger problem, though, is less Sanders’ union’s interference with the VA leadership’s inability to get rid of the trash and other non-performers in the VA leadership, than it is that inability to throw out the trash.

In recent weeks, the VA has seen a host of job actions against senior employees overturned by the Merit Systems Protection Board [see, for example, here]…. They include the demotion of two VA executives accused of gaming the department’s hiring system for personal benefit, and the dismissal of a New York VA director over patient safety concerns.

And

The appeals fight has grown into an escalating intra-administration showdown between VA leaders, who call the decisions off-base, and protection board officials, who blame bad legislative changes for the unsatisfactory rulings.

These union hacks even are trying to turn the problem back onto Congress:

They also accused lawmakers of overhyping problems within the department, saying lawmakers are conflating malice and malfeasance with mistakes made by under-trained supervisors.

Under-trained? The union hacks agree, then, that these supervisors are unfit for their positions, yet they insist these unfits must be retained, anyway. No trash out, not under-performers out, nobody out.

After all, our veterans are used to the idea of becoming casualties on a war’s battlefield. They and everyone else should just shut up, and our veterans should accept being casualties on an artificial VA battlefield, too.

Veteranos administratio delende est.