VA all about it’s employees not Vets
It’s common to hear that the federal government is nothing more than a jobs program and that is evident at the hearings that are going on in Congress. Whistleblowers tell their supervisors about problems and solutions to those problems at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and those complaints fall on deaf ears. The Washington Times reports on the hearings from last night;
Whistleblowers, meanwhile, described important claims documents set to be shredded, a culture of ignorance and retaliation among managers, and pressure to quickly get through the backlog, which meant some veterans likely got shut out of benefits while others may have scammed the system. All the while, appeals have shot up.
“These are veterans. I mean, somebody would be asleep at the wheel not to realize these things were going up,” said Ronald Robinson, a senior veterans service representative, former Army first sergeant, and one of three whistleblowers to testify.
In one dramatic moment, committee Chairman Jeff Miller, Florida Republican, posted a handwritten note one of his staffers had seen on a site visit to Philadelphia in which a top regional VA executive had written that committee investigators were to be ignored, and that singled out known whistleblowers.
Supervisors were more interested in “making numbers” than caring for veterans. At Stars & Stripes they report that their focus on “making numbers” actually made clearing the backlog fall behind further;
The VA claimed last year it cut the number of disability and pension claims languishing for more than two years to just 1,258, but in reality the department wrote off more than 7,800 cases without making final decisions on granting benefits, the IG found.
The VA has struggled publicly for years with its benefits backlog, but the manipulation that was disclosed Monday by investigators and heard before the House Veterans Affairs’ Committee suggests new depths of dysfunction and wrongdoing in the Veterans Benefits Administration, which accounts for half of the VA’s total responsibilities.
And the VA did such a good job at protect that agency’s employees jobs, they all got bonuses;
The list CBS News obtained from the House Veterans Affairs Committee shows $2.8 million in bonuses going to senior Veteran Affairs executives, with several going to officials in charge while care was delayed for veterans.
Firing Shinseki was a good start, but the whole culture at the Department of Veterans Affairs needs to be changed and they need to clean house.
Category: Veterans' Affairs Department
Until this is resolved and the VA is on the road to recovery I believe all bonuses should stop.
There should not be any bonusses in the Government at all.
rb325th…I agree. I was surprised when I first heard there were bonuses.
A few years ago, don’t remember exactly when, the VFW caught VA paying bonuses to claims processors. Not for how efficient they were but for how many claims they denied. Was supposed to have stopped but I will wager it has not.
How can ANY bonus be justified when we are going through Sequestration cuts?
How can we be giving bonuses is the government has to ‘shut down’ in order to raise the debt limit?
I thought working in government was supposed to be for people that had a sense of service; not a way to make as much money as someone in the private sector?
This fucking country has lost its perspective.
I work for DoD as a civilian. No bonuses for any of us that are, actually, you know, supporting the troops.
Wanna fix the VA? Fire everyone that is there now and make veteran status a requirement to apply. We may have disliked the service, but we do take care of each other.
All their jobs are always open to only
Onboard eemployees.
I hate to tell you, but as a veteran and a VA Employee myself I can with quite a bit of confidence tell you that some of the worst emloyees I have seen have been fellow veterans.
Think about that shitbag private we all knew. Well Pvt Tentpeg, he got out and into the VA and went up the ladder on the “screw up and move up” plan. No real qualifications to be seen, but hey he is out of the hair of the department he was a fuck up in…
We have them all, the shammers and scammers…all “veteran” employees loooking to glide to retirement doing as little work as possible.
Tru dat. The shitbird that could never be counted on and was a cancer in the unit could always find a place in the VA. Not to mention the disgruntled no loads that HYT’d out and got priority placement in the VA. Plenty of good folks in the VA, but they get more than their fair share of malingerers.
I got nothing regarding this anymore… been this way for so long. I hope they can try and fix this and not fuck it up even more than every other time Congress “fixes” something at the VA.
I’m certain that the governments, and to a greater extent the VA’s, motto is, “If it ain’t broke, fix it till it is.”
This sounds much like the school system in the State of California, too. Entrenched, unscrutinized interests are hard to dislodge.
Problem as I see it is that with the wars ending and no more political capital to be made on either side of the aisle, our noble politicians are going to put VA problems deep on the back burner.
Soldiers and dogs, get off the lawn.
The troops can stay on the lawn as long as they hold the umbrella for the pres.
Unlike private businesses the government has no peer competitor, so it doesn’t have to answer to the consumer for whatever services it provides. Some services (defense, courts, etc. otherwise known as public goods-http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicGoods.html) can only realistically be provided by the government and the founders helpfully defined what some of those are in Article I, Section 8.
Of course politicians prefer to control services, accrue power and reward cronies with jobs and contract. Thus their incentive is to accumulate power and in order to do this they will lie, intimidate opponents and generally throw their weight around. So, of course the VA bureaucracy is more interested in protecting its employees (particularly the higher ranking ones who have proven themselves reliable water carriers) than it is in serving veterans.
Frankly I think we would all be better off if we got some kind of long term insurance or some sort of vouchers that we can use as we see fit when we leave the service.
I’ve worked on both sides of the swinging doors in hospitals (clinical side and administrative side). The short story is this: for a hospital to correctly focus on the patients, the adminstrative side must have medical staff on it with the responsibility and authority to mediate between the two, very different, worlds. Otherwise, with non-medical administrative staff positioned above medical staff on the flow chart, money will always be the primary focus, and not the patients.
I still think the best way to fix this is the same way to fix every other screwed up bureaucratic monstrosity in the government. Shut it down.
Let the government pay for the vets insurance and the vets can go to any hospital for treatment. And not Medicare/Medicaid “pay for” I mean that they pay an actual insurance company full value for a health insurance policy to cover the vets.
Two surveys. First, survey every VA employee in every office who has been with the VA no longer than three years. Have them ID the best employees. Every workplace everywhere knows who the best are. Second, survey the clients, the Vets who have been receiving VA services for at least one year. Solicit their feedback on the office, center, whatever and invite them to ID the bad and the good. Next, obtain a profile based upon the two surveys. Go from there. ridding the VA of managers of lousy offices and employees who think they deserve a paycheck just for appearing at work most of the time. It ain’t gonna happen, I know, but I can dream, can’t I?
I like this plan a lot 2/17 Air Cav. Only drawback is finding the honest people who would take the survey results and make real change happen.
It was someone here who posted that the job of administering veteran claims should be contracted to the various VSOs such as the VFW, AL, DVA. Sounds like a plan to me.
My friend lost a limb in Iraq and submitted his claim the same time I did. We were both given a 10% non-service connected disability rating in the same week.
Yeah, mine is only for PTSD, but last time I checked, you don’t accidentally lose a limb while being blown up on your own time.
Just a question here, because as far as I know you are either Service Connected and get a rating, or you are not. I have never heard of a “non-service connected disability rating” from the VA.
In al my years of dealing with the claims process, that is the first time I have ever heard anything like that.
Yeah, it’s one of those things some of us have been grumbling about for several years. Evidently it is part of that “homeless vet” thing. VA employees are out trolling in cities to find “homeless” vets, then twisting their arms until they sign up for benefits. One fellow I know is now 100% rated, for nothing occurring while in military service (in fact it happened before his brief hitch in the Army), given an apartment, and it took less than 2 weeks after he agreed to sign the form.
rb325. I was set back by that 10% non-service connected rating also. In all my years with the Vet Center and DOD I’ve never heard of such a thing. 0% SC, yes….10% Non-service connected? I don’t get it. You can only be rated for “Service Connected” injuries, unless something has changed since I retired in 07′. Also, losing a leg is an automatic rating of higher than 10%, or used to be. Help us out here Flagwaver. If this is something new I’d love to know more as I’m our MOPH Chapters Service Officer.
Supposedly the VA hires a lot of veterans.
More like a lot of blue falcons.
“Firing Shinseki was a good start, but the whole culture at the Department of Veterans Affairs needs to be changed and they need to clean house.”
Which is EXACTLY what I’ve been alluding to since the very beginning. Simply replacing the figure head at the top does absolutely nothing to combat the corruption and bureaucracy culture that has been a part of the organization for decades. And with each tentacle acting on its own.
Some of these people should be in jail.
A recently-retired (USAF) friend of mine just got hired by the Tucson V.A. and is going through their newcomers training now. Should be interesting, as he’s a grumpy, crusty former aicraft maintainer and AFSOC/Rescue flight crew, and has issues with the V.A. since retiring…..
If you really want to see the shit the VA is doing, sit down and read Sen. Coburn’s report about the VA:
http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=577d9e90-ee2a-4eee-a52d-2cf394420761
My final Masters paper will be on what I think needs to be done to “fix” the VA… and I have a few ideas that would shift a lot of paradigms if I was the one in charge.
Memo for Dullass and his “lawer” buddy – the VA is killing patients and screwing vets over on a regular basis… you need to fear them more than this or other Stolen Valor blogs. If you don’t believe me, read the report (or have someone read it to you).
The VA exists to provide jobs for people who feel cashing their paycheck is a job responsibility, or at least that’s how it sure seems today.