{"id":60654,"date":"2015-07-01T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=60654"},"modified":"2015-07-01T08:36:58","modified_gmt":"2015-07-01T12:36:58","slug":"richard-griffin-va-oig-steps-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=60654","title":{"rendered":"Richard Griffin, VA OIG steps down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bobo sends us a link to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.militarytimes.com\/story\/military\/benefits\/veterans\/2015\/06\/30\/acting-va-ig-retires\/29525849\/\">Military Times<\/a> which reports that Richard Griffin, the Inspector General of the Veterans&#8217; Affairs Department has announced that he he is resigning. I wonder who will notice that he&#8217;s gone. Griffin&#8217;s job was to uncover fraud waste and abuse in the department, but the media and whistleblowers have been doing that job for him.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Griffin has faced harsh words from critics in recent years for not doing enough to hold VA leadership accountable for problems regarding patient wait times, overprescribing by physicians, and medical records manipulation.<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, a group called VA Truth Tellers blasted Griffin for a &#8220;pattern of whitewashing and deceit&#8221; and called for his resignation. Several lawmakers have also publicly berated the office in recent months for working too closely with VA officials instead of publicly exposing potential wrongdoing. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Our buddy, Concerned Veterans for America&#8217;s Pete Hegseth had some harsh words, too;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cCVA has been calling for the removal of Richard Griffin for over eight months, and his departure is long overdue. While acting as IG, Griffin diminished the effectiveness and trustworthiness of the Office of Inspector General (OIG) by whitewashing the deaths of veterans at the Phoenix VA, withholding documents from members of Congress, and not publicly releasing IG reports that document misconduct within the VA. His politicization and mismanagement of the OIG has inhibited the ability of the office to properly uncover the true extent of misconduct throughout the VA in the aftermath of the VA wait list scandal. This is one of the reasons why just yesterday a group of VA whistleblowers called for his removal.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCVA urges the White House to immediately nominate a permanent VA IG \u2013 something that the troubled Department has lacked for over 18 months. An independent and effective Office of Inspector General is essential to fixing the VA\u2019s toxic culture and the future of VA reform efforts.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Griffin has been in the job for only eighteen months. His temporary replacement, Linda Halloway has worked in the agency for 23 years, so we can expect equally unproductive and uninspired performance from her in Griffin&#8217;s wake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bobo sends us a link to the Military Times which reports that Richard Griffin, the Inspector &hellip; <a title=\"Richard Griffin, VA OIG steps down\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=60654\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Richard Griffin, VA OIG steps down<\/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-60654","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\/60654","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=60654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60654\/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=60654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}