This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

  • Wait for DVA disability claims 10% longer

    JP sends us a link to the Military Times article telling us what we already knew – that waits for disability claims at the VA is about 10% longer than it was just two years ago.

    Ill or injured service members now wait an average of 394 days to move through the military’s disability evaluation process, an increase of more than 10 percent since 2010 and well off the goal of 295 days, according to the Government Accountability Office.

    In fiscal 2011, just 19 percent of active-duty service members and 18 percent of National Guard and Reserve members completed the Integrated Disability Evaluation System, or IDES, process within the goal of 295 days for active-duty members and 305 days for Guard and Reserve personnel.

    And at some installations, the average wait is nearly 18 months or longer. At Fort Belvoir, Va., for example, soldiers face an average processing period of 537 days, while guardsmen at Fort Carson, Colo., wait 651 days.

    But, I’m sure that someone will tell us that it’s either better than the Bush years, or somehow it’s Bush’s fault. When I filed my claim in 1995, it took about 90 days, JP says that was his experience, too. So, I don’t what they did before all of these computer things, but if it was better then, than now, something is definitely not working.

  • VA-appointed money managers take disabled vets to the cleaners

    The Houston Chronicle reports that, despite warnings from the DAV DVA’s Office of the Inspector General, VA-appointed fiduciaries have been picking the pockets of disabled veterans to the tune of millions of dollars;

    In the past decade, twice as many Texans have been prosecuted for stealing from disabled veterans enrolled in the VA fiduciary program as in any other state, records obtained by the Houston Chronicle show. More than 20 veterans’ family members and trusted members of the community — including a former police officer, a federal employee and optometrist — have been convicted and others, including two attorneys, face pending charges of stealing from disabled veterans whose assets they’d been assigned to protect, according to court records from across the state.

    Many sordid swindles were perpetuated on veterans too ill or disabled to report the crimes, records show. Some crimes went undetected for years before being uncovered through tips, thieves’ confessions or the VA’s own infrequent checks, interviews with attorneys and court records show.

    Some were kids stealing from their own parents, but most were supposed to be trusted professionals. You should probably read all of the stories to protect yourselves. The VA says in the article that thefts are rare. Yeah, well, they’re only rare if it’s not happening to you.

    The VA also claims that they’ve tightened oversight, but that remains to be seen. I’m not exactly sure that some DVA bureaucrat is as concerned about my money as I am.

  • Phony defrauds VA, gets prison

    POW Network sends us a link to the Justice Department press release announcing the imprisonment of one Keith Morris, who has never served a day in the military, but was able to get the VA to give him $148,122.52 in health care services. One procedure, brain surgery, was valued at over $98,000.

    Also during that time frame, Keith Morris continually provided the Denver VA Medical Center with medical documents that he signed as his brother, with his brother’s Social Security Number and date of birth.

    The person with the real identity Keith Morris was using stated that because of these issues with his brother, he now has warrants for his arrest out of Colorado, was let go from a job because of those warrants, and was unable to secure employment with a government contractor because he cannot get a security clearance.

    Ya know, hearing about these phonies makes me wonder what the verification process is at the VA. We have real veterans standing in line waiting to get treatment, and then these phonies slip right through the door. While he’s in prison, they ought to reverse his brain surgery and put him back the way he was before the operation.

  • Update on Patty Murray’s letter

    I finally made a call to the office of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, and they coughed up the letters I’ve been asking for. It seems I was wrong when I speculated that the letters didn’t exist. This is the letter that the committee received from Shinseki;

    Basically it says what she told her constituent; the DoD and DVA scrubbed the records of POWs and only found two receiving benefits who hadn’t earned them, and one of them was dead already and the other they were deciding what legal actions they were taking. They said they found 647 other phonies who weren’t receiving Federal benefits, but they don’t mention whether they were receiving state benefits. I know there are at least that many with POW license plates in South Carolina and double that number in Florida and Georgia.

    I sat right behind Army Chief of Staff Shinseki when he lied to the Small Business Committee that he didn’t know the first load of black berets were coming from China, so I know what he’s capable of doing. If Veterans Affairs Director Shinseki testified to Congress that the sky is blue, I’d have to look outside.

    Anyway, despite my previous claims to the contrary, it doesn’t look like Patty Murray lied.

  • What Stolen Valor costs

    I commend Combat CAsh for his post earlier and agree that the case, at least from a veteran standpoint has never been put into words so well here. But what sticks in my craw about the Stolen Valor thing is that the government won’t even go after the criminals who are costing us money while they go about the business of slashing legitimate veterans benefits. For one example, something I’ve written about before is the benefits that the DVA is paying to bogus POWs which is so easily remedied from The Strategy Page;

    There are only 661 officially recognized U.S. POWs from the Vietnam period. About 500 of those are alive, but when questioned, VA found that they were paying disability payments to nearly a thousand “Vietnam POWs.” It got worse after the 1991 Gulf War. There were 21 officially recognized POWs during that conflict, but the VA found it was paying disability to 286 Gulf War POWs. For years, the VA claimed that they checked out the records before recognizing all these phony POW vets. Apparently there were not a lot of people at the VA who knew how to count.

    Once recognized as a POW by the VA, you have several financial benefits (like not having to make copayments for medical services). Thus the fake POWs are also guilty of stealing money from the government. Veterans groups believe the VA resisted dealing with this obvious fraud because of unwillingness to deal with the resulting bad publicity.

    Our man in Congress who has investigated his own State estimates that each phony POW costs the state and federal government $36,000/year in benefits.

    As I’ve said in the past, the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office maintains an online datebase of every veteran who has ever been recognized by them as a POW, and the easiest thing in the world is for the Department of Veterans Affairs to do is check their list of the people they’re paying benefits to the very complete list that DoD has compiled, but the DVA won’t do it. I’ve even volunteered to do it for them, to no results.

    We all know that Joseph Cryer, the Chippendale SEAL, (links here, here and here) is a phony and he’s collecting $2000/month for his totally phony mission into Libya in 1986. I’ve contacted the DVA OIG no less than three times on him, and still there’s no action and he continues to collect his benefit – which will never be recovered, even if he strips 24-hours-a-day up there in Ocean City.

    So tell me that the government’s blind eye doesn’t hurt veterans and makes us all look like lying leeches.

  • Another veterans’ plea for help lands him in court

    Sean Duvall, a 45-year-old homeless Navy Persian Gulf War veteran made a call to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs hotline when he was contemplating killing himself with a gun he’d made. The counselor sent the police to pick him up and they got him to a VA treatment facility and now that it seems that he’s on the way to recovery, the federal prosecutor is filing charges against him (Washington Post link);

    Duvall, who served in the Navy and lives outside Roanoke, now faces four federal counts related to manufacturing and possessing the homemade gun, which could lead to a 40-year prison sentence.

    Veterans groups and mental health advocates warn that Duvall’s prosecution could have a chilling effect on distressed veterans who might be contemplating suicide.

    “Every veteran I’ve talked to is outraged,” said Dan Karnes, president of the Roanoke Valley Veterans Council. “When we have veterans that are coming back from wars now, they’ll think twice about seeking help when they see what was done to him.”

    And, oh, yeah, the persecutor pursuing charges, well he just happens to be DVA administrator Eric Shinseki’s son-in-law, Timothy Heaphy;

    Through a spokesman, Heaphy declined to comment. But his office has argued that it has an obligation to prosecute Duvall, who admitted to making and possessing the weapon and was on the Virginia Tech campus, the site of a mass shooting in 2007, at the time of his call.

    He’s such a coward that he had to “decline comment” through a spokesperson? Yeah, this will go a long way towards veterans seeking help. Do we have to talk to our lawyers before we call the hotline?

    It brings to mind the case of Matthew Corrigan that we discussed several days ago.

  • MSNBC fact checkers declared dead

    TSO sends an article in keeping with our media fact-checking theme today. It’s about a veteran who depends on his disability check being declared dead by a dead government agency;

    The U.S. Veterans Administration has declared him dead four times, but Miller, a Brevard County resident, has refuted the claims.

    “To me, it’s stupid. I can’t die but one time. They have killed me four times,” he said.

    Miller, a former drill sergeant, served 10 years in the Army. He said he lives on a government pension and Social Security.

    Yeah, there hasn’t been a Veterans Administration since March 15, 1989. You know what else I discovered? If you do a fricken Google search for Veterans Administration, the search takes you the the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. In fact, it’s impossible to filter out DVA links if you’re looking for some information about the VA.

    Of course, the terrible part of the story is the bureaucratic terror that Jerry Miller is experiencing. Maybe he should make stories up about his career like Matthis or Joe Cryer and the DVA will leave him alone. We certainly can’t get the DVA’s OIG to look into their pasts when we supply them with documentation.

  • DVA releases your PII…again

    According to Stars & Stripes, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs released the Personal Identifiable Information (PII) to the folks at Ancestry.com who promptly posted it to the internet;

    VA officials supplied the information to Ancestry.com in March 2011 as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by the genealogy site. The records were supposed to only contain information on deceased veterans, but also included more than 2,200 living veterans due to a department error.

    Department officials found out about the error just last month.

    Yet, here we are, this month, just finding out that the information was released 10 months ago. So how do they know that the PII hasn’t been used by criminals? Of course, the article is written like it’s Ancestry.com’s fault, but clearly the VA is playing fast and loose with our PII. There’s absolutely no reason that Ancestry.com would need that type of information, yet there it is posted on the internet.

    Every fucking time I turn around, I’m getting classes on how to handle PII and how to avoid that information getting into the wrong hands. So wtf is happening at the VA?

    Officials said they are still investigating why the information was mistakenly included in the records released to Ancestry.com.

    Um, because they’re all incompetent boobs and they don’t care? And the rot starts at the top.

    Individuals who believe they may have been affected by this incident have been encouraged to contact the VA. Those whose information was exposed will be eligible for a free credit report for one year.

    Yeah, thanks. Actually, the first time (how many times have there been?) the VA lost my PII, I subscribed to LifeLock and just pay it myself every year because by the time the VA tells us about the breaches, it’s probably too late.