Whistleblowers at the Department of Veterans Affairs recounted the intense retaliation they faced after reporting wrongdoing Tuesday during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.
Lawmakers blasted VA leadership for allowing the culture of intimidation to persist despite a series of warnings against the practice in recent months.
Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, questioned why existing whistleblower protections are unable to shield federal employees from retaliation when they report wrongdoing.
“What is amazing to me is, it seems pretty simple, pretty easy, unfortunately, for mid-level managers within these agencies to retaliate and terminate whistleblowers, but then it’s enormously difficult, apparently, for department heads … to hold those people who retaliate against whistleblowers accountable,” Johnson said.
One whistleblower said the VA’s inspector general has played a role in making life difficult for employees who draw attention to internal wrongdoing.
Shea Wilkes, a clinical social worker at the Shreveport, La., facility, said he struggled with management after he reported crony hiring practices at his facility.
Wilkes said he was offered a promotion in exchange for dropping the matter. After he refused the deal, his superiors launched a campaign against him, he said.
Wilkes became frustrated with his fruitless attempts to report the cronyism through VA channels and turned to the inspector general for help in 2013. However, the supposedly independent watchdog relayed Wilkes’ complaints back to the agency, prompting even more retaliation.
Wilkes said VA inspector general investigations are typically “half-assed and shoddy.”
“The VA IG is a joke,” Wilkes said.
Johnson suggested the inspector general’s tactics could be a form of “damage control” to intimidate other would-be whistleblowers into silence.
Dr. Christopher Kirkpatrick, a psychologist at the VA’s Tomah, Wis., clinic, committed suicide after he was fired for asking questions about the overmedication of patients there.
The Tomah facility has come to be known as “Candyland” due to a series of allegations that VA physicians prescribed an inordinate amount of opiates to veterans seeking treatment.
Sean Kirkpatrick, brother of Christopher Kirkpatrick, testified on behalf of his deceased brother, telling the committee that Christopher Kirkpatrick was chastised for alerting his superiors to the fact that many of his therapy patients were lethargic and unresponsive due to the quantity of drugs they had been given.
Christopher Kirkpatrick was instructed not to discuss the treatment decisions of VA physicians. He was also told not to answer veterans’ questions about their own medications.
Johnson said it was “obvious” Christopher Kirkpatrick had been terminated because of his whistleblowing, not because of the “flimsy” excuses put forward by the VA.
Brendan Coleman, an addiction therapist at the VA facility in Phoenix, was placed on administrative leave after raising concerns that internal negligence had played a role in six of his patients committing suicide.
Coleman said he had, on several occasions, physically walked suicidal veterans into the emergency room for treatment, only to have them wander off without the VA staff noticing. He said suicidal veterans were sometimes being watched by “janitors and volunteers” instead of qualified professionals.
After he brought the problems to the attention of his supervisors, a VA social worker violated medical confidentiality laws by pulling Coleman’s medical records. Managers at the Phoenix VA hospital soon attempted to use information they learned from Coleman’s records against him in response to his whistleblowing, openly questioning his “mental health” and eventually dismissing him for threatening colleagues, an accusation he denies.
Another VA whistleblower, Joseph Colon, reported to Congress and the agency’s inspector general a number of issues he encountered at a VA facility in Puerto Rico before he was placed under multiple investigations and briefly suspended.
Colon highlighted the fact that some physicians were treating veterans without a medical license and that a doctor had attempted to falsify a patient’s medical records to cover up a mistake in his treatment.
He also blew the whistle on a VA director who was promoted even though the staff under his supervision had not helped elderly veterans who needed assistance with bathing, eating and going to the bathroom.
Colon’s access to email was inexplicably cut off and his office was moved to a windowless room after he reported the internal wrongdoing.
“Management here in San Juan, Puerto Rico, actually reward people that actually help them build a case to fire a whistleblower,” Colon told lawmakers.
The Office of Special Counsel, which assists whistleblowers in retaliation cases, expressed frustration with the VA in a letter to the president that blasted the agency for failing to fire any of the officials involved in a high-profile health care scandal at the Phoenix hospital.
Carolyn Lerner, head of the Office of Special Counsel, said Tuesday 35 percent of all retaliation cases filed to her office will come from the VA this year.
Lerner testified that the VA filed more cases with the Office of Special Counsel last year than the Pentagon, even though the Department of Defense employs twice as many civilians.
Linda Halliday, deputy inspector general for the VA, insisted the watchdog is committed to “protecting [whistleblowers’] identities, understanding their concerns, objectively seeking the truth, and ensuring VA pursues accountability and corrective action for wrongdoing” in testimony before the committee.
Halliday said she was aware of only two instances in which inspector general staff inadvertently disclosed the identities of whistleblowers and that “administrative action” was taken.
“I am not aware that there has ever been an intentional breach of a complainant’s confidentiality,” she said.
