Dateline: July 18, 2014

Meanwhile, over at the Veterans Administration (VA), the scandals just keep on coming. Now, witnesses have told the House Veterans Affairs Committee that the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) routinely created impossible goals for processing veterans’ benefits applications, then “created” data showing those goals had been met and retaliated against workers who reported the shenanigans.

The hearing was held in response to multiple complaints by VA employees that the VA’s recently reported significant reduction in the backlog of unprocessed veterans’ benefit claims was the result of data manipulation, and that no more claims were actually being processed.

In both her testimony to the committee and her report to Congress, VA Assistant Inspector General Linda Halliday confirmed that VA workers at the Philadelphia benefits office had been ordered to change original dates on old unprocessed benefits claims to current dates, falsely making then seem to be brand new applications.  Once the dates had been changed, the applications dropped off the overdue report, but remained unprocessed.

Halliday told the committee that her office is getting similar date-change complaints from other VA facilities, including Baltimore, Little Rock, Los Angeles, and Oakland. “We are concerned at how quickly the number of regional offices with allegations is occurring,” she testified.

According to a VA statement, the problem was simply a “misapplication” of its 2014 leadership memo, in which claims processors were authorized to change the original filing dates of overdue claims to the “discovered date,” the dates they were found.

Under guidelines in the memo, every use of a “discovered date” required both and explanation for the processing delay and the approval of a VA top administrator. However, a review of 30 recent “discovered date” cases, Inspector General Halliday found that none had fully complied with the requirements.

VA Undersecretary for Benefits Allison Hickey testified that, while the date-change process had been suspended, it had actually been “pro-veteran,” because it allowed old claims to be approved without further medical investigation by VA doctors.

Philadelphia VA claims examiner Kristin Ruell testified that managers at her facility instructed claims processors to change the dates “on any claims, regardless of the circumstances, if they were older than a certain date.”

The VA’s leadership memo also promised employees that, “There will be no negative consequences for you, the employees, as a result of following this guidance. The only possible negative consequences are those that exist if we fail to meet our goals for this project and for any actions that keep us from doing so.”

In his statement, committee chairman Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Florida), accused the VA of using the date changing technique to create an “appearance of success.”

“There is not a corner that VBA leadership will not cut nor a statistic that they will not manipulate to lay claim to a hollow victory,” he said. “What we all want to see, both my Republican and Democrat colleagues, is progress, not deception.”

Just hours before the hearing, the VA claimed that the agency had achieved at 56% reduction in its backlog of long-unprocessed claims, which hit a high of 611,000 cases in March 2013.

When asked by the committee if she trusted the VA’s success figures, Inspector General Halliday replied, “At this point, I would say no, I can’t trust those numbers.”