“Good Stewardship of Public Funds”
Remember the recent brouhaha about the recent GSA conference in Las Vegas that cost Uncle Sam $823+k? Well, that looks to have been chump change. Another agency has easily topped that.
Apparently the VA also likes to hold conferences. As in holding two rather large conferences during the past year, at a total cost of at least $5M.
Large conferences have a purpose, I guess. And organizations do derive some benefits from periodic face-to-face meetings.
But I have a rather hard time understanding how an organization with a backlog of literally over a half-million claims pending action can think that spending $5M annually on conferences is good stewardship of public funds. For that same $5M, the VA could have hired 100 additional employees at the GS11 or 12 grade level (including the normal +33% of salary for employer taxes/benefits/retirement) provided they hired locally and didn’t have to pay PCS expenses.
Priorities here just don’t seem exactly as they should be.
Category: Veterans Issues, Veterans' Affairs Department
That’s the problem with a lack of accountability, when no one is really minding the store the employees are robbing the place blind…and when the employees think they actually own the store instead of being just middle management…well you get this kind of spending because after all, they’re worth it. And if those pesky veterans have to wait a little longer, well there is no punishment for p1ss poor on the job performance in the civilian sector of government employees so the veterans can wait while we have our 5 million dollar parties…
But, why shouldn’t the VA pat themselves on the back. I mean, look at all of the claims they have passed. You know it is a real accomplishment to give benefits to more SEALs than have actually served in the teams from their inception (they are Special Ops, right?). To give Colonel Snipers benefits for their heroic missions solo behind enemy lines (who need spotters anyway). And to give Master Sergeants and Sergeant Majors benefits after their twelve years of service (they must be high speed, right?).
If I and those like me can’t get our benefits to take our families out to a nice dinner at the very least, these civilians shouldn’t be able to party with the money that could go to help those who served.
I’d disagree somewhat, VOV. I don’t think it’s as much a case of the employees running amok as it is misplaced priorities on the part of leadership. Agencies don’t have huge, multi-million $$$ conventions unless their senior leadership signals their willingness to support.
It may not have been Shinsheki himself, but someone high up in the VA tacitly or overtly approved of spending $5M of public funds on this. And IMO, most of that could have been better spend elsewhere – like in efforts to reduce the backlog of cases pending VA action.
Hire 100 new people with the same money and you can at least make a dent in the problem. Assuming the bottleneck is in adjudication, at 2 hrs/case for review and decision that works out to somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 cases that could be adjudicated in a year. That’s not the whole backlog – but it’s a damn good chunk of it.
as a civil servant I can tell you isn’t due to lack of oversight…there is plenty of that. It takes coercion and duplicity. Meaning that someone knew but all turned a blind eye.
I hesitate to place blame on one place but its up and down the chain. An employee wrote the contract, setup the services, planned the events, a budget person released funds, a manager requested funds, a senior leader approved the plan and the budget, and release of the money.
Additionally they ALL have to take ethics classes of some kind or another. Like in the Army we are plagued with the yearly bucket of feel good classes. They know. They all know. Hell even in my position I have held the line on how to spend funds. where we can obligate and where we can’t. In one case I was removed from the project and what I warned would happened did. two contractor protests, an audit, and eventual shut down.
This is bullshit. As a civil servant our primary duty is to be caretakers of the public trust. Pisses me off to read shit like this.
Hondo,
Once again I should have been clearer, to me the employees are the leadership of the VA who think they own what they have been given stewardship over. They are directly responsible as you indicate for what goes on beneath.
We the people are the owners of that store, that is what I meant. We, through our elected leadership, placed these people in positions of stewardship over our funds and our veterans who need services. That these people don’t understand their first obligation is actually service to the nation through prompt attention to their primary job function, is truly abhorrent. That they feel they are entitled to throw themselves lavish parties at the expense of those they are obligated through their job definition to serve is criminal. That they don’t understand what a privilege they have been granted to do the right thing by those willing to place themselves in harms’ way on our behalf is a direct reflection to their lack of character as humans of principle.
No greater love for country can be had than those who have promised to give all in its’ service, if those tasked with delivering the promise of the nation to those warriors through their efficient and fiscally responsible leadership had a similar love of nation, we would not see an article like this ever.
My apologies for not being clearer (once again).
Having just ended a career as a ‘public servant’ this kind of BS only happens at the higher/highest levels either with their knowledge if not approval.
Yat Yas 1833: fully agree. IMO, he only way something of this magnitude occurs is if senior leadership (1) approves, whether explicitly or with a wink and a nod; (2) is by design willfully ignorant – in which case they’re just as culpable as if they’d knowingly approved; or (3) is so incompetent that they can’t look at the horizon in Hawaii at 6AM and tell which way is east. And I just don’t believe (3) to be the case.
Steadfast&Loyal: I agree, to a point. However, if senior leadership wants something badly enough, they’ll find someone to do what they want. The person executing may do so willingly, or they may be coerced into doing so. In either case, the lower-level folks executing are still somewhat responsible. But senior leadership IMO still retains the lion’s share of the responsibility for things like this – if for no other reason than that they never asked the hard questions and made the hard decisions.
That’s what senior leadership gets paid to do: provide the proverbial “adult leadership”. And here, that IMO simply didn’t happen. The result was the waste of at least $4+M in public funds. I can accept having 1 large convention or 2 smallish ones, but IMO you can do quite a good enough job of either for far less than $5M.
I predict that this lack of training in how to properly resource and fund training conferences will lead to a training conference to establish the proper methods to resource and fund training conferences, to be followed by a training conference to train those responsible for resourcing and funding training conferences on the newly established methods to resource and fund training conferences.
Bobo: spoken like someone unfortunately all-too-familiar with the term “self-licking ice cream cone”. (smile)
No matter where I’ve worked, the higher up you are, the better you eat. And conference. I, and other employees like me, go to the conferences up the road, or do webinars. It’s the middle and upper management that gets to go to Miami, Denver, Dallas, etc., for a week at over about $4000 a person.
Rank hath its privileges.
Great. Thanks, VA. Like the GSA didn’t slap enough of a coat of shit paint on all of us.
Well, looks like another year of Bobo’s training slides for all us stoopid gubmint employees. Since it’s the mid-grades among us who do all the bad…hey! Wait a minute!