VA covers for phony POWs
I know I’ve written about this before, but I’ve been recently made aware of a movement in Congress to end this travesty. We’re always discussing waste, fraud and abuse at the VA and this is the most easily solved case. The Department of Defense lists 545 living Vietnam POWs and 20 living POWs from the first Gulf War based on the stuff that you and I know to be credible information and personnel accountability reports from the eras.
However, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs pays benefits to 966 claimants from Vietnam and 286 claimants from Desert Storm. That’s a total of 687 phonies collecting VA benefits designated for POWs. The problem is easy enough to fix…all it takes is for the DVA to compare the list from the DoD with a list of their claimants. But for the last ten years, the DVA has stonewalled any private or congressional investigation blaming their computers for being so outdated that they’re unable to generate a list of veterans who claim to be POWs. Isn’t that what computers are for?
In an email last night, Navy Captain James McGrath, an actual Vietnam POW and former two-term president of NAM-POWS wrote to us;
One VA administrator admitted to me that “the VA would rather error on the side of the POW claimant than to error against him by denying his claim that he was a POW.”
Seein’s how there is an actual list of POWs from DoD, that’s just ridiculous.
With all of the talk about slashing veterans’ benefits to balance the budget, this is a no-brainer place to start.
The DVA ought to announce an amnesty program to all of the claimants and then after a reasonable period, start investigating and i volunteer to compare the lists. But initially, we should announce an amnesty period for the DVA, and then start investigating and prosecuting at the DVA for a decade of inaction.
Just trust me when I tell you that the person influencing this new attack on the problem is someone most of you know and someone who won’t let go of this issue, like a pitbull on a mailman. Stay tuned for updates and things you can do to help.
Category: Veterans Issues
I am so tired of the computer excuse. Remember the good ol days when we wrote shit on paper. We could do list comparisons back then, and in the scheme of things this isn’t a very big list. Hell I’ll even make them an offer. Send me the lists, format ain’t important. I’ll import them into a spreaddsheet and then run my handy dandy little compare application I have and get the results back to them. Depending on the input data would 30 minutes be too long?
And I’ll do it for free.
Be careful, guys, or you might incur the wrath of Sphincter as being phonies, yourself.
What’s the average amount of bennies being paid out to one of these fakers?
Dave, bite your tongue! Don’t you know these guys are just “expressing” themselves and that this is a victimless crime, with no harm or fraud intended?
(Do I really need to tell you this is sarcasm?)
If the VA were to cut me off at the knees for being a phony, then I will simply go to them and say “here is my DD-214, and here are all my records from DA” if they still find fault then then I will go through the hoops. I would rather go through a but load of hurtles than to give one faker one f**king DIME he or she is not due
There were 286 POWs in Desert Storm?? Really? Wow, I guess the media blew it big time on that, because the number they were giving out back then was much lower than that.
1. Cut VA funding for the amount they are overpaying, and tell them to get it straightened out.
2. Tell them they have 60 days to identify the frauds and to initiate criminal complaints with the Department of Justice, or criminal charges for those responsible for paying the frauds under conspiracy charges will be filed. If they knowingly are paying people who can easily be identified as not being eligible for those funds, they are also guilty of a criminal act.
It’s way past time to weed out all these phonies. Why in hell would the VA be covering for these bastards?
Hasn’t this shite been brought up before, yet these phonies are still getting money?
By the way, have any other retirees gotten a letter from DFAS stating that their FITW is going up on March 1st? WTF, take more taxes from retirees, but give money to phony POWs.