Hours after release of a devastating audit that found top-to-bottom problems with the administration of veterans’ pensions in the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs office — including records manipulation — the man most responsible for those failings was promoted to a high-paying job in the department’s Washington headquarters.
“Effective Monday, April 20, 2015, I will begin a detail with P&F Service as an assistant director. I will be working on a number of projects with them. I will be working from Washington DC,” Gary Hodge, the office’s pension manager, wrote in an email to colleagues at 1:30p.m. on Wednesday.
“P&F” stands for Pension and Fiduciary Service at VA Central Office and is a promotion, where his decision-making stands to impact veterans across the country. As a detail, however, the move is for an undetermined time period.
Less than three hours prior, a 100-page report from the Veterans Affairs inspector general, stemming from surprise visits last year, found that the office “cooked the books” to understate the amount of time veterans waited for pensions, that managers repeatedly ordered subordinates to change the dates on backlogged complaints, failed to respond to 31,000 questions from veterans, and made millions of dollars in erroneous payments to other veterans, even after the veterans told the office that they shouldn’t be receiving them.
The Philadelphia office has two divisions, the Veterans Service Center and the Pension Maintenance Center. The most severe wrongdoing occurred in the pension branch, which Hodge led.
The 31,000 unanswered questions, data manipulation, and dozens of boxes of missing mail identified in the inspector general’s report were all directly under his supervision.
Hodge is a GS-15, one of the highest ranks a career federal civil service employee can reach, and is paid $147,000.
“He gets paid way too much to not understand that it’s not OK to change dates of claims,” one of his employees said.
Hodge declined to comment, transferring a reporter to a spokesperson. That line remained on hold for over 15 minutes.
Hodge’s office told the inspector general that he did not mean to manipulate data but misunderstood VA policy. In his new job, he will be helping to make policy for such processes.
The department has seldom fired officials implicated in wrongdoing and has instead transferred them to different areas, often giving them a promotion, where sometimes they are in charge of policing against the very sort of actions in which they previously participated.
Weeks ago, for example, the head of the Reno, Nev. benefits office was promoted to special assistant to the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Field Operations in the Veterans Benefits Administration after his office showed abysmal performance metrics and he refused to provide information to a bipartisan group of lawmakers from his state.
Reno’s Edward Russell is the latest in a long line of bureaucrats promoted or moved to Washington or regional supervisory offices after failing in their own jobs at the VA.
Top managers have said that it is too hard to fire employees, but they have resisted efforts by Congress to give them more flexibility in disciplining problem employees, even opposing a bill to stop whistleblower retaliation.
Just as the department has a habit of having executives fail upwards, it has consistently sought to manipulate metrics rather than working to improve them. It has now manipulated data to hide wait times of patients and contracting delays in addition to pension snafus.
