{"id":59467,"date":"2015-04-23T12:03:55","date_gmt":"2015-04-23T16:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=59467"},"modified":"2015-04-23T12:03:55","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T16:03:55","slug":"vas-fudged-numbers-continue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=59467","title":{"rendered":"VA’s fudged numbers continue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in February, we wrote a bit<\/a> about the Washington Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee and her examination of the actual numbers compared to the claims of Robert McDonald, the VA Secretary, to Congress that 60 VA employees had been fired because of the scandal last year that enveloped the agency. Ms. Lee whittled the 60 down to eight or so, who hadn’t yet resigned or retired to escape punishment. The New York Times <\/a>whittles it down even further today;<\/p>\n

Robert A. McDonald, asserted in a nationally televised interview that the department had fired 60 people involved in manipulating wait times to make it appear that veterans were receiving care faster than they were. In fact, the department quickly clarified after that interview, only 14 people had been removed from their jobs, while about 60 others had received lesser punishments.<\/p>\n

Now, new internal documents show that the real number of people removed from their jobs is much smaller still: at most, three.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The documents given this month to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, which provided them to The New York Times, show that the department punished a total of eight of its 280,000 employees for involvement in the scandal. One was fired, one retired in lieu of termination, one\u2019s termination is pending, and five were reprimanded or suspended for up to two months.<\/p>\n

The only person fired was the director of the Phoenix hospital, Sharon Helman, who technically was removed not for her role in the manipulation of waiting lists but for receiving \u201cinappropriate gifts,\u201d according to the department.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, actually one was fired, and she was not fired for her part in the scandal even though she actually caused the problem that became a scandal. But one is almost 60, right?<\/p>\n

In a statement…the department…said that more than 100 other employees were facing disciplinary action.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A year later. <\/p>\n

\u201cRather than disciplining bad employees, V.A. often just transfers them to other V.A. facilities or puts them on paid leave for months on end,\u201d [Representative Jeff Miller, Republican of Florida and chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee] said in a statement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then they lie to the American people and veteran service organizations about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in February, we wrote a bit about the Washington Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee and … VA’s fudged numbers continue<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}