Guy stuffing a file cabinet at work.
On February 25, 2015 Rep. La Malfa of California asked for permission to address the United States House of Representatives for a few minutes to lament the file cabinet found stuffed with 14,000 claims for benefits which were ignored by the VA.
What was shocking about this situation was not that the VA staff had found a unique and creative way to not process claims but that staff at that VA office knew about the files for many years but said nothing. It also turned out that some of these claims dated back to the 1990’s?
Rep. LaMalfa comments are as follows:
“Mr. Speaker, the Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General issued a report last Wednesday on their investigation into the nearly 14,000 veteran benefits claims that were found in a filing cabinet in Oakland, California.
Last year, these claims were brought to our attention by VA staff members, who have known about these claims for many years–despite their best efforts to raise awareness of the injustice in how these claims were being handled.
In July 2014, the former Deputy Under Secretary of the VA for Field Operations testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that the 14,000 claims that were found in a file cabinet had been brokered so that they would receive attention by the VA’s highest performing offices.
Just 2 weeks prior to that on a site visit to the Oakland VA, the regional and division management told me that these 14,000 claims basically never existed. As a matter of fact, they claim it was a story made up by disgruntled employees.
The VA’s Office of Inspector General’s investigation confirmed the discovery of 14,000 claims in a filing cabinet, confirmed that some of these claims dated back to the 1990s, confirmed that thousands of these claims had not been processed, and confirmed that the staff at the Oakland VA had not been directed to properly store these claims.
Oakland VA’s management claimed after my visit that they then had discovered 13,184 veteran benefit claims and 2,155 claims which required action or review. But during an onsite review, the Office of Inspector General could not confirm the existence of these claims due to the Oakland VA management’s “poor recordkeeping practices.”
How was the Oakland VA able to arrive at such exact numbers without maintaining records that allowed the OIG to verify the existence of these claims? It just doesn’t make sense, and we have to get to the bottom of these numbers. The VA is required by law to respond to every initial claim they receive, to safeguard Federal records, and to protect private information of the veterans they work with.
When the Oakland VA managers discovered that 2,155 claims were more than several years old and required action or review, a special projects team was formed to complete this urgent task. Members of this team have told my staff that many of those claims belonged to veterans who had passed away while waiting for benefits to be processed and that their families were never contacted.
Inexplicably, the Office of Inspector General later discovered that 537 initial claims that had been marked by this special team as processed were never actually processed. Some of these claims were as old as June 2002, yet another troubling instance of the Oakland VA managers failing to provide the type of service northern California’s veterans deserve.
The VA Office of Inspector General viewed only 34 of these unprocessed claims, though for some reason they declined to select a random sample. Instead, the 34 claims were selected “judiciously,” which didn’t make any sense. Of the 34 claims that were reviewed by the Inspector General’s office, seven still remain unprocessed. In fact, though, these claims had been reviewed several times from December 2012 to June 2014 without any action being taken.
In one instance, a veteran with PTSD was underpaid almost $3,000 because his initial claim was not processed correctly.
This type of dysfunction and complete lack of oversight and accountability cannot continue in Oakland or at any VA regional offices across the country.
Sadly, this report sheds very little light on who should be accountable for these failures and is incomplete.
I am grateful the report was done and that the inspector general did delve into this issue at Oakland and many other offices, but the fact that no real conclusions were made on who is to be held accountable means much work remains to be done. We must continue to search for these answers and work to make sure the VA regional offices are properly serving our veterans.
I am also grateful, on the positive, for the many staff members of the VA–many, former veterans themselves–who care about this. They process many of these claims and make sure veterans are served. But we see there are a lot of holes in the system, obviously, that are making many veterans not have the confidence that they are going to be served, that they are going to get their claims processed, or indeed get health care if they need it later.
Indeed, the tragedy we have is that anywhere from 12 to 22 veterans give up each day in this country and commit suicide. Because they have no hope left of having the promise kept to them shows that we have much to do.
So I am grateful for those VA staffers that come to us blowing the whistle on what is wrong with the system when they can’t get help from their management to make things right. We ask them to please keep coming forward.
Contact my office, contact my staff on what needs to be done to get the word out to help make this right, because we want the VA to function well. We want the employees to feel like they are part of a system that is serving veterans and to have a good relationship within their office, but also to ultimately serve what we need as taxpayers and Americans that revere our veterans.”
Source: Congressional Record
See video: CSPAN Rep. LaMalfa Speaks Against Oakland VA’s Gross Mismanagement Confirmed by OIG Report https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_TJ7p6k8Wc