Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

Stars & Stripes reports that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs won’t reinstate Linda Weiss, former director of the Albany-Stratton VA Medical Center in New York, who Judge Arthur S. Joseph of the Merit Systems Protection Board decided shouldn’t lose her job despite a demonstration of gross incompetence.

VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson vowed to ignore the order to restore Weiss to her director’s job and to award her back pay.

“We believe today’s untimely decision is unenforceable under the law, and does not entitle Ms. Weiss to return to VA employment,” he said in a statement.

Weiss, who was paid $165,000 annually, retired while the case was pending and could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Joseph’s order comes more than a week after the board issued a statement that the VA’s discipline had been reversed. The statement did not provide an explanation or instructions.

Good for them, if they stick to their guns.

In January, MSPB judges also overturned demotions for the directors of the Philadelphia and St. Paul, Minn., VA regional offices, despite largely upholding the VA’s findings of wrongdoing. In those cases, as with Weiss, judges noted the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act only allows them to rule on whether a punishment is appropriate, as opposed to allowing them to offer a lesser penalty.

“If (the act) did not prohibit it, I would mitigate the penalty,” Joseph wrote in his Weiss ruling. “However, because that is not allowed, the only option is to reverse the action outright.”

Yeah, whatever, judge.

A number of you folks sent us the links to the story of Emil Limpert, a World War II veteran who says he was injured during the war in the Pacific and he finally went to the VA to see if he could get some help. Fox2 says the he enlisted the help of AMVETS to submit to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs his documentation, but the VA says that they can’t find a record of his service;

Limpert, a bit of a packrat, saved all his old paperwork. He had his discharge papers, a roster of those injured in the attack, and the X-ray taken of his leg after he returned home. On top of that he had the two bronze stars and the purple heart he earned in combat.

All that information was, with the help of a veterans service group called AMVETS, was sent to the Veteran’s Administration to apply for benefits. After two months of waiting he received a letter from the VA saying he needed to provide more proof.

Fox News says that his records may have been lost in the 1973 fire. According to Hondo, that’s entirely possible. AMVETS can help Mr Limpert restore those records if he still has the copies of documents that he claims to have.

I tend to believe Mr Limpert. We all know that the VA has a hard time responding in a timely manner to real veterans. If he was a phony, they would have immediately awarded him 70 years of back pay.

Until November, Linda Weiss was the director of the Stratton Veterans Administration Medical Center in Albany, New York. It was that month that she was removed from that position by VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson. However, according to the Albany Times-Union she won’t fired after a review by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. Sloane says that he won’t allow her to return to a position which allows her to supervise veterans’ healthcare, though.

Gibson removed her from the position, he said Friday, because she did not take timely, appropriate action to ensure that veterans received safe medical care. Weiss did not hold her employees accountable for actions that led to inappropriate care, he said.

“In my judgment, a medical center director who fails to proactively address patient safety concerns or fails to be an advocate for vulnerable Veteran patients has no place in the VA,” Gibson said.

Gibson also did not provide details about the specific patient safety issues considered by himself or the MSPB.

The Times-Union article provides details of some of the problems that have been reported at the hospital, mostly in regards to unpunished healthcare workers, some accusations of drug abuse and other patient abuse problems that Weiss allowed to exist without criminal charges against the perpetrators.

So basically, we, the taxpayers are going to continue to pay Weiss, but she doesn’t have a job. Nice work if you can get it. Thanks MSRB.

Bobo and Hack Stone send us links to the news regarding those two Veterans’ Affairs executives that the VA demoted for charging taxpayers $400,000 for their moving expenses. Kimberly Graves and Diana Rubens were demoted by the VA last month to punish them and send the message that VA SES employees aren’t above the system. According to Stars & Stripes, two Veterans’ Affairs administrative judges reversed those demotions;

In separate decisions, administrative judges in Chicago and Philadelphia reversed the demotions, finding that while the women were guilty of the charges against them – namely that their actions created the appearance that they’d put their own interests ahead of veterans — other executives who’d taken the same actions were not punished so the women could not be either.

Basically, the judges ruled that because the system is so broken, that the system has been broken for such a long time, now is not the time to fix the system. Let’s not start holding executives responsible for their actions.

Calling Graves ruling “a twist of tragic comedy,” the chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee said the case proved the need for drastic reform of the federal civil service system.

“The outcome of this case is a slap in the face to the many dedicated VA employees who do the right thing on a daily basis,” charged Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla. “Enough is enough. Every objective observer knows that the federal civil service system coddles and protects misbehaving employees instead of facilitating fair and efficient discipline.”

I’m out.

Bob sends us this link to the Daily Caller about Japhet Rivera, the former hospital director in Dannville, Illinois. Rivera was being investigated for retaliation against a whistleblower. He went to the Merit Systems Protection Board to protect his job. The VA was AWOL from the hearings, they didn’t present any evidence against Rivera, because thier plan was to buy him off, instead of firing his ass for not doing his job and for sexual escapades on the job. According to Rivera;

“They tried to fire me, but because of my rights to go to the MSPB to review the case, an administrative law judge reviewed the case and she was about to send me back to work for a couple of [reasons],” Rivera told TheDCNF.

“One was the VA failed to provide all the information that they used to make a decision. It really wasn’t all that important … but at any rate they didn’t provide it to me, so that was a major” reason the judge sided with him, Rivera said.

“She was going to return me to work and the VA said they just wanted me out of there,” Rivera said. “Under the agreement for my resignation, the VA gave me seven months of pay and all my expenses…They also paid for the attorney’s fees and basically everything.”

They paid him $86,000 instead of going through the process to fire him, you know, because it’s only tax payer money and there’s an endless stream of it.

The Arizona Republic reports that two of the chiefs at the Phoenix VA hospital that triggered a nationwide investigation into the VA healthcare system will return to work on Monday after 19 months on paid suspension;

Lance Robinson, associate director of the Phoenix VA Health Care System, will be assigned as a strategic planner at the VA’s southwest regional office in Gilbert, known as VISN 18, according to spokeswoman Jean Schaefer. Brad Curry, the system’s chief of Health Administration Services, will serve as a health systems specialist.

The two men have been focal points in a controversy over the VA’s perceived failure to hold leaders accountable for mismanagement and misconduct that caused a breakdown in care for veterans in Arizona and nationwide.

[…]

Under questioning from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., [Undersecretary David Shulkin] testified that the VA has been unable to complete internal investigations of the two men because the U.S. Attorney’s Office prevented interviews with key witnesses amid a criminal investigation.

I know that’s been brutal for the pair, being on 19 months paid vacation, and now they have to go back to work. Poor guys.

Thanks to Brown Neck Gaiter for the link, but I’m out. I’m speechless, type-less, I got nuthin’.

This story is about a week old and I’ve been meaning to mention it, but got overcome by events. Anyway, Dave reminds us of it this afternoon. It sems that the Justice Department has decided that they won’t prosecute those two women who are still VA employees, Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves who bilked the VA out of hundreds of thousands of dollars while reducing their workload and increasing their salaries. According to Fox News;

Rubens had been earning $181,497 as director of the Philadelphia regional office for the Veterans Benefits Administration, while Graves earned $173,949 as leader of the St. Paul, Minnesota, regional office. Before taking the regional jobs, Rubens was a deputy undersecretary at the VA’s Washington headquarters, while Graves was director of VBA’s 14-state North Atlantic Region.

Rubens and Graves were accused of obtaining more than $400,000 in questionable moving expenses through a relocation program for VA executives, the inspector general’s report said.

The U.S. Attorney’s office said it has “referred the matter to the VA for any administrative action that is deemed appropriate.”

So, the VA demoted the pair, but for some reason, there was a “paperwork mixup” which prevented their demotion. Basically, if it ever takes affect, they’ll still be making six figures for the jobs that they were doing before they were caught. I hope that the pair is done taking the US taxpayer to the cleaners, but somehow, I don’t think so.