VA Chief of Staff Vivieca Wright Simpson called VA Secretary David Shulkin on Friday morning and informed him she was retiring, Shulkin told Stars and Stripes. In addition to the ethical violations, her retirement comes amid reports of internal strife at the agency between a White House appointee and longtime civil servants.<\/p>\n
Wright Simpson, the third-most senior VA leader, worked at the VA for 35 years. She served as chief of staff since Feb. 27, and was Shulkin\u2019s top aide when he was the undersecretary of health in 2016.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Her ethics violation involved misleading about Shulkin’s wife while she accompanied the secretary on a trip to Europe;<\/p>\n
The announcement comes two days after VA Inspector General Michael Missal released a report detailing \u201cserious derelictions\u201d by VA personnel regarding a 10-day trip to Copenhagen and London, which included full days of leisure activities and cost taxpayers at least $122,000.<\/p>\n
Investigators found Shulkin improperly accepted Wimbledon tickets, and they alleged Wright Simpson changed an email to an ethics official to justify using taxpayer dollars to pay travel expenses for Shulkin\u2019s wife, Dr. Merle Bari. She \u201cwillfully and knowingly\u201d made false statements, the report says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Shulkin repaid taxpayers $4,312 for his wife’s travel expenses.<\/p>\n
The case was referred to the Justice Department where they declined to prosecute the criminal charges. The article is headlined to clearly misrepresent that Wright Simpson resigned, but she merely took an unscheduled retirement.<\/p>\n
Thanks to Devtun for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Stars & Stripes reports that VA Chief of Staff Vivieca Wright Simpson resigned after she misled … VA Chief of Staff Vivieca Wright Simpson resigns (retires)<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77776","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\/77776","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=77776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/77777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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