Philadelphia’s Department of Veterans Affairs office “cooked the books” to understate the amount of time veterans waited for pensions and other benefits, according to a massive inspector general’s report released Wednesday.
Delays were not because of a lack of funds or personnel but because of “inefficient workload practices” and “disorganized storage,” the inspector general said in the 100-page report.
More than 31,000 benefits claims were pending an average of 312 days instead of five, which is the standard, because they were “mismanaged” at “various levels.” That meant that questions from homeless veterans and widows were met with silence, and notices that a veteran had died went unheeded.
Numerous times, management ordered staff to change the dates on old claims to be the current date.
Meanwhile, the government paid out millions in extra payments to veterans because it failed to keep track of duplicate records.
In one case, for example, a veteran who was receiving an extra $1,100-a-month payment notified the department of the error, but the government still didn’t correct it. In other cases, it was notified multiple times and didn’t stop payments.
The claims backlog should have been obvious to Washington headquarters earlier because it was many times the size of other offices.
Headquarters produces national reports of apparent duplication, but they were going to waste because Philadelphia staff didn’t know they existed. However, the national lists were flawed too and missed most of the duplicates. The office had no system in place to identify duplicates even though computers are well-suited for the task.
The inspector general found 6,400 pieces of military mail that workers said were unidentifiable, but which the inspector general said could easily be matched to veterans. One employee also hid bins of mail.
Managers had been warned in previous audits about shortcomings, but did not take steps to correct them.
Sixty percent of veterans’ reviews of the quality of service they receive were also doctored. “Although VSC management was aware the supervisor altered individual quality reviews … no action was taken to stop the practice,” the report said.
Inspectors found 68 boxes of mail waiting to be scanned. VA officials then scrambled and scanned in 20 over the weekend so that they could tell inspectors four days later that there were only 48, indicating that the persistent backlog could be eliminated with some effort.
A previous review had noticed the backlog and recommended that it be eliminated within six months, but as soon as the reviewers left, bureaucrats went back to the status quo.
The inspector general also found that — even though the department routinely invokes “privacy” as a shield from oversight by Congress and the media — workers are careless with veterans’ personal information.
As agents walked through the office, they happened to see dozens of veterans’ bank account numbers and other information in plain view.
Call center staffers also complained about lack of bathrooms and of insects and other bad working conditions at an outlying office and refused to talk to inspectors over the phone because they feared that management was secretly monitoring their phone calls, and they may have been right, the inspector general said.
“Further, call center staff are required to use approved scripts for specific call types, reportedly making them seem robotic, nonsensical, or downright misleading,” the report said.
The Philadelphia office has gotten a new boss since around the time inspectors conducted their site visit, in June 2014, but already there are indications that the new boss is the same as the old.
Director Diana Rubens accepted a taxpayer-paid $288,000 “relocation payment” to move from Washington to take the job, even though the cost of living is lower three hours north and she sold her Northern Virginia home for hundreds of thousands more than the one she bought in Pennsylvania.
To get to the bottom of malfeasance and incompetence in the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs office, the inspector general also recommended the convening of an Administrative Investigation Board, a panel comprised of executives from other department facilities.
That’s the same pattern as has happened at the department’s troubled Tomah, Wis., hospital. But in that case, the Washington Examiner found that the panel was led by an employee who had engaged in records manipulation and coverup of her own.
