Oakland VA failed to process claims, investigator says
WASHINGTON — A federal investigator looking into why thousands of veterans’ benefits claims were found languishing in a filing cabinet in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Oakland office contradicted a top agency official’s testimony that all the claims had been processed correctly.
“I don’t know what her definition of action is,” Brent Arronte, an official with the VA inspector general’s office, said Wednesday, referring to a statement last month by Allison Hickey, the agency’s undersecretary for bene-
fits, that the 13,184 claims were duplicates and had all been processed.
Testifying before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Arronte said there was “no paper trail” for investigators to follow, but that an audit of 60 of the claims showed that many were “not duplicates” and that “several required action.”
Rep. Jerry McNerney, a Stockton Democrat on the committee, said that “clearly there’s a contradiction here,” to which Arronte replied, “Absolutely.”
The committee is looking into charges of mismanagement at the Oakland and Philadelphia offices of the Veterans Affairs Department. The Oakland VA office has been under fire since a former employee turned whistle- blower revealed last year that compensation and disability claims were discovered stashed in a filing cabinet in 2012.
Setting claims aside
The whistle- blower, Rustyann Brown, told the House committee Wednesday that the claims were often labeled “no action necessary” and put aside.
“Nothing was done to protect these claims,” Brown said. “Nothing was done to put them in the system. There were no letters to survivors.” Letters or claims from veterans who had died “were just put aside,” she said.
Brown had been assigned to the project of looking at the claims and said the oldest one she saw dated to 1996.
Among the most heartbreaking, she said, was a letter from an elderly woman whose husband had served in World War II. The widow wrote to the agency that her husband had reassured her that when he died, the VA would see to it that she received the benefits he had earned.
“Baby, they’re going to take care of you,” the man promised his wife, according to Brown.
“She was dead six years by the time I read that letter,” Brown testified. “I can’t tell you how many were like that.”
Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a Butte County Republican, became emotional while recounting the episode. “She wasn’t even aware there were widow benefits,” LaMalfa said. “This little lady writing that down on a flowery piece of paper. It breaks my heart.”
Julianna Boor, who became the director of the Oakland VA office in May, conceded that Brown was right on many counts, but that the agency is now “headed in the right direction,” having hired 58 claims processors and converted to an electronic benefits system.
“It’s correct ( that the World War II veteran’s widow) may have passed away and there may not have been another action” by the agency, Boor said.
When the 13,000- plus benefits claims were found, the agency wasn’t sure what they were, so it checked them against electronic payments, Boor said. After that step, 2,100 had to be checked against paper records.
“Admittedly it took too long,” Boor told The Chronicle during a break in the hearing. She said that at the time the agency was “inundated with paper.”
Boor pointed out that more than half the Oakland office’s staff is made up of veterans, who she said are “wanting to do the right thing.”
Philly even worse?
By most accounts the problems at the Philadelphia office are even worse than in Oakland. Committee Chairman Rep. Jeff Miller, R- Fla., focused on a $ 309,000 relocation payment for Philadelphia regional office Director Diana Rubens to move from nearby Virginia to take the job, suggesting that Rubens would have moved there anyway to be close to her mother. Rubens denied the charge.
Miller said he would try to abolish the relocation bonus program, which he said has turned into an entitlement for well- paid agency executives.
Miller said a “pattern of abuse and incompetence” was apparent at both offices, including evidence of manipulating claim dates in Philadelphia to make backlogs look smaller. He said he would issue subpoenas within a week if the VA doesn’t produce additional documents he has requested.
“It’s absolutely inexcusable that the Oakland office ignored more than 13,000 claims, some dating from the mid-’ 90s,” Miller said.
Pressure to speed up
The committee heard from other former employees who described a VA claims processing system where employees are awarded points for processing claims quickly — a reaction to earlier scandals that found extensive claims backlogs at the agency.
Brown said the pressure of the new system encouraged employees to move claims too quickly.
“You should do the right thing for the veteran whether it takes you 15 minutes or an hour,” she said.
McNerney said he is “not quite ready to believe there’s nefarious conduct” at the Oakland office. But if the VA doesn’t come up with a concrete plan to reform its operations, he said, “it will require us to really start cracking down.”