VA still fudging numbers after all these years

The Washington Post‘s Michelle Ye Hee Lee is quickly becoming my favorite fact checker at the Post. Yesterday, she checked Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald claim that he’s been busy firing incompetent leaders at the VA since he took over the job. It turns out that he’s not being completely honest to Congress and to veterans;

In his “Meet the Press” interview, McDonald also said 100 senior leaders are under investigation by the inspector general and the Department of Justice.

Yet McDonald is incorrect saying 60 employees who manipulated wait times were fired.

Disciplinary actions for 75 employees have been proposed since June 3, 2014, according to the VA’s most recent weekly briefing to the House and Senate committees on veterans affairs. These actions were related to patient scheduling, record manipulation, appointment delays and/or patient deaths. The proposed actions included removals, admonishment (a written letter of censure), reprimand (a stronger letter of censure), suspension of less than two weeks and probationary termination. Admonishment or reprimand letters can be removed from employees’ personnel files after two or three years. (Definitions for disciplinary actions are here.)

Of the 75 employees, only eight employees have actually been removed, as of Feb. 13, 2015. Twenty-three cases were pending. Five employees resigned before a decision was made on their case. Others were demoted, were on probationary termination, had some other disciplinary action, or had no action taken at all.

McDonald used his new personnel authority to propose removals of five executives — in Phoenix, Georgia, central Alabama, Pittsburgh and the VA central area office in Washington. Two retired before they could be removed, and three were actually fired. But of those three terminations, only one was officially related to the VA scandal — James Talton, director of Central Alabama’s VA.

Ms. Lee continues that of the 900 employees that the VA says that they’ve fired, were fired for reasons that a lot of people get fired; absenteeism and poor performance, not usually related to the scandal that cost their Secretary, Shinseki, his job last year. Ms. Lee writes that in 2013, the year before the scandal, 2,247 VA employees were fired, more than double the number fired last year, after the scandal. Lee gives McDonald four Pinocchios for providing this information to the public without any real context.

So, nothing has really changed at the VA. The Secretary is giving answers that make it look like he’s doing what the President hired him to do, but those answers aren’t based in any sort of reality. But, who is surprised.

There is a culture of lying about the internal workings of the Department that goes back years and that culture isn’t going to change as long as the same people are working there.

That’s why I’m not surprised that last week, the VA and the White House want to defund the Veterans Choice program saying that veterans aren’t using the system that the White House and Congress crowed about six short months ago. They say the reason is that veterans aren’t taking advantage of the program – based on their numbers. You know, like the numbers above.

Category: Veterans' Affairs Department