VA secretary blames ‘gripers and complainers’ for audit
Retired Maj. Gen. Myles Deering, Oklahoma’s secretary of Veterans Affairs, says an audit released last week was the latest attempt to undermine his business-minded reforms of the state agency.
“It’s a big political deal and it makes me sick but, you know, I have to do my job, regardless,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
For most of the three-year audit period, Deering was executive director of the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs, which operates seven nursing facilities around the state. He retired in January but remains the governor's Veterans Affairs secretary.
On Wednesday, state auditors released a searing 75-page report that found “a culture of fear and intimidation exists” at Veterans Affairs and “morale is reportedly at an all-time low,” leading to a lower level of care for veterans. The audit relies heavily on anonymous complaints by hundreds of employees, who Deering calls “gripers and complainers.”
“There’s been a lot of things that have been said and some of it has been extremely venomous towards me and
my staff,” Deering said. “I will tell you that the audit team never interviewed anybody from the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs or myself. Never, not one time.”
Gary Jones, the state auditor, said his staff spoke to many people at the Veterans Affairs central office in Oklahoma City, as well as employees around the state.
“And we received a tremendous, tremendous response back from employee surveys,” Jones said. “If it was disgruntled employees, there’s a large number of those people and the information we were getting was very, very similar from all of them.”
By the wayside
In the eyes of Deering, last week’s audit was the latest in a series of political attacks on Veterans Affairs reforms that followed his appointment as executive director in early 2015.
“I wanted to do a great job. I came in with a mission and vision for this agency but it really fell by the wayside” because people inside the agency and outside it “failed to accept that vision,” Deering said. The vision included a business-minded approach to operation of the government agency.
“I’ve got legislators who just absolutely threw arrows my way because I didn’t meet the needs of their constituents in their districts,” he said. “When we get in the military, nobody ever asks you what party you’re a member of. We just try to take care of everybody and that’s the same thing we did here.”
Auditors say office politics, not party politics, dominate at Veterans Affairs. Care center employees, most of whom work in small towns, feel disconnected from a vindictive and vendetta-driven central office, the audit found. Veterans Affairs leaders scream and shout obscenities, auditors wrote. Deering and executive director Doug Elliott flatly deny that.
The audit paints the picture of a state agency engaged in a passiveaggressive war with one of its offices, the Talihina Veterans Center in southeast Oklahoma, which is set to close in the future. Employees and city officials there have fought closure of the scenic center and feel strongly that agency heads harbor a vendetta against them. Elliott and Deering blame last week's critical audit on disgruntled Talihina employees.
“I believe the center should be moved from Talihina,” Deering said Tuesday. “I don’t say closed. I say it should be moved from Talihina, simply so we can go to an area that can provide better support and better employees. I’m not saying they’re all bad.
“Within 30 miles of Talihina is 19,000 people. There’s better places you could be that will draw better employees — or, let me rephrase that — you could have more choices of employees than you can in the Talihina area.”
Deering, a combat veteran from a family of combat veterans, sometimes phrases his efforts at reforming Veterans Affairs in military terms. Resistance came from veterans center administrators unwilling to do what he told them to do, Deering says.
Elliott claims Deering resigned as executive director of Veterans Affairs due to the pressures of the pending audit. Deering described his February resignation this way: “At some point in time, when you feel like you’re being shot at, sometimes you’ve got to do what’s best for you.”