{"id":67624,"date":"2016-08-25T09:58:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-25T13:58:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=67624"},"modified":"2016-08-25T09:58:39","modified_gmt":"2016-08-25T13:58:39","slug":"va-loses-30-cars-and-fires-the-guy-who-told-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=67624","title":{"rendered":"VA loses 30 cars and fires the guy who told them"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A number of folks have sent us <a href=\"http:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2016\/08\/24\/los-angeles-va-hospital-lost-30-cars-then-fired-worker-who-reported-it\/\">links to the story<\/a> of Anthony Salazar, a Veterans Affairs driver in Los Angeles who told his supervisor Robert Benkeser that there were 30 VA vehicles missing out of their stable of 88 vehicles. He also told Benkeser that there was significant abuse of Department credit cards. To reward Salazar, Benkeser fired Salazar;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The department convened an \u201cadministrative investigation board\u201d (AIB) that resulted in \u201ca letter of counseling\u201d to Benkeser for mismanaging the motor pool. Benkeser then fired Salazar several months later.<\/p>\n<p>The Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a government-wide agency that protects whistle-blowers, said earlier this month that VA blocked Salazar from showing that he was being retaliated against. The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) imposed \u201can overly rigorous\u201d standard of proof to show prohibited retaliation.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Salazar was fired Feb. 4, 2015. The ease with which Salazar was fired \u2014 he was put on a \u201cperformance improvement plan,\u201d told he didn\u2019t meet the goals, then let go \u2014 stands in contrast to the many employees who unambiguously committed egregious misconduct and are still on the job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Funny how the VA can&#8217;t fire people who really need to be fired &#8211; folks who abuse the system &#8211; but they always find a way when they want to fire someone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A number of folks have sent us links to the story of Anthony Salazar, a Veterans &hellip; <a title=\"VA loses 30 cars and fires the guy who told them\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=67624\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">VA loses 30 cars and fires the guy who told them<\/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-67624","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\/67624","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=67624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67624\/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=67624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}