VA workers blame pressures for slowing response times
WASHINGTON – VA performance standards meant to speed up claims processing may actually have delayed benefits for veterans, including some who died waiting for answers.
That’s what employees of benefits claims processing offices in Philadelphia and Oakland, Calif., told members of Congress during a hearing Tuesday.
Claims processors were afraid they would be fired if they didn’t work quickly enough to earn enough “points” on an employee performance metric. That led them to cherry-pick easy cases, bury difficult ones and change dates on claims to make it look like they were being handled faster, employees testified.
“If you tried to do the right thing and slow down to do it right for the veteran, you were setting yourself up for trouble,” testified Rustyann Brown, who recently retired from the Oakland office.
Kristen Ruell, an eightyear employee of the Philadelphia office, said the performance standards are unreasonable and that they encourage employees to “do things to save their job” even if their actions harm veterans’ ability to receive benefits. “It’s not fair to place an employee in that situation. It is even less fair to the veteran whose claim may be affected,” she said.
Joseph F. Malizia, a 37year employee and president of the AFL-CIO Philadelphia office, said the problems stem from ousted Veterans Affairs Secretary’s Eric Shinseki’s goal of processing claims within 125 days.
“That was a very ambitious goal to get to and very unrealistic. I think that’s the driving force behind” the problems, he told the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
Ms. Ruell testified that claims are still being mishandled in the Philadelphia office, contradicting a statement from VA Under Secretary Allison Hickey, who told reporters earlier this week that nearly all the problems have been resolved.
The hearing followed a report showing numerous problems at the Philadelphia office that led to $2.2 million in duplicate benefit payments and an average wait of 10 months for responses to veterans’ inquiries.
Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said the problems appear to be systemic and that the VA isn’t doing enough to fix them.
“Merely requiring staff to attend training sessions and shuffling poor performing managers to other stations is not enough,” Mr. Miller said.
Assistant Inspector General Linda A. Halliday said she has “never seen such a dysfunctional and toxic environment” as in the Philadelphia benefits office where employees were too intimidated to report problems and fearful of retaliation.
She said managers there need to be replaced with leaders employees can trust. Ms. Ruell agreed. “Without removing the officials making the bad decisions, this issue will continue to be a revolving door of taxpayer waste,” she testified.
A new director brought in to correct problems in Philadelphia has created new ones. Moving expenses for Diana Rubens, a former undersecretary who was transferred from Washington D.C., have attracted scrutiny from both members of Congress and Ms. Halliday’s office, which has opened an investigation.
At issue is about $300,000 in relocation costs for Ms. Rubens, including a $211,750 fee paid to a financing company that resells property.
The relocation package is meant to entice top talent to take hard-to-fill jobs. Under it, if Ms. Rubens couldn’t sell her home in Alexandria, Va., within 60 days, a real-estate contractor would buy it from her at its appraised value. In exchange for taking on the hard-to-unload property, the VA paid the contractor, Stone Financing, 28 percent of the home’s value.
Public records show that Stone paid Ms. Rubens the $770,000 and later resold it for a loss, collecting just $692,500 from the buyer, but ultimately profiting because of the fee paid by the VA.
Danny G.I. Pummill, deputy undersecretary who approved the expenditure, said Ms. Rubens “couldn’t be settling into a home in Philly and trying to sell a home here at the same time she’s trying to fix the problems in Philadelphia. That’s what the buyout program is for.”
Several members of Congress said they view the reimbursement as excessive.
“Paying such an exorbitant amount on behalf of a federal employee to move three hours down the road is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer funds in this fiscal climate, or any fiscal climate for that matter,” Mr. Miller said.
Ms. Rubens testified she didn’t know whether she would have moved without the relocation incentive.
Ms. Halliday said her office is investigating the expenditure, which also included about $16,000 for “subsistence and temporary expenses” and $23,000 for shipment and storage of household goods.