[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 78 (Thursday, May 22, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H4819-H4821]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       VETERANS' BENEFITS SCANDAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa) is 
recognized for the balance of the hour as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, this is a conversation that has been a long 
time coming. I am in my first term here in the House of 
Representatives, and soon after becoming a Federal Representative, it 
became very apparent to me that our veterans in California, in our 
districts, and all across the country really need a lot more of our 
help, as Members of Congress, as our staff both in our districts and 
even in D.C. can do for us for the veterans.
  You have seen the revelations here lately that have finally gotten 
the attention of the American public, with what has been going on in 
Arizona, previously Pittsburgh with Legionnaires' disease, and the many 
other revelations about how poorly our veterans are being treated in 
this country once they have served for us and have come home, expecting 
the things that they were promised before they made that service for 
us.

                              {time}  1330

  For example, revelations about secret waiting lists in the Veterans 
Administration as we have seen in Arizona. They have shocked most 
Americans here in recent weeks.
  Today, I speak out on an even bigger crisis within the VA system, and 
that is the monumental failure of the Oakland, California, Veterans 
Benefits Administration.
  Most of our veterans must run through this nightmarish gauntlet 
before they can even hope to be added to the secret waiting list at a 
Veterans Administration medical facility.
  Here on the floor we talk a lot about claims backlogs often, and we 
have seen mountains of paper files. Our inevitable solution always 
seems to be to give them more money to fix the problem. Well, the 
Congress, with the American taxpayers' dollars, has funded VA pretty 
adequately. We have made an effort here recently to try to help catch 
up with the backlog with the funding required. We were then issued 
cheerful responses of decreases in processing times that are 
systematically manipulated by upper level officials at VA in order to 
show progress to make us go away.
  Right now, the Oakland office boasts that they have no claims over 
125 days old. In reality, tens of thousands of the Oakland VA are 
trapped in a cycle many veterans call ``delay, deny and wait until they 
die.''

[[Page H4820]]

  One main trick is to omit key information that would help the veteran 
in his or her claim, whether it be the exams, timelines, what have you, 
then deny the claim, ship it off for 2 or 3 years' worth of review and 
appeal process. In the meantime, we will deem it processed.
  The management is more interested in the open number of claims stats 
on the reports than processing them accurately or in a timely fashion, 
and then reaping bonuses by posting a savings to the government--to the 
taxpayers--by denying these claims and these payments.
  How many veterans are homeless because their claims for benefits have 
been sitting on a cart or in a janitor's closet or in the hallway by 
the director's office for years--or even decades? Benefits that would 
help them to not be homeless, to have shelter, to have better health, 
to even be in a place where they could then seek employment and be in a 
much better way?
  How many veterans have suffered and died waiting years for their 
claim to be handled so they could seek medical treatment? Some of it 
needs to be very timely to have exams and treatment.
  How many of our veterans have given up hope and committed suicide out 
of desperation and despair that comes with years of waiting, because 
they don't feel like anybody cares about them anymore and that they 
don't have any value to our society?
  Yet, on weekends like we have coming up, we glorify them--as we 
should, those that have fallen--on Memorial Day and later in the year 
on Veterans Day. Yet this is what our government does to them. We know 
that we have veterans that take this ultimate step of suicide. We know 
they exist.
  I submit that many of our Nation's veterans are part of a backlog 
that exceeds the most extraordinary numbers we currently have on file. 
For example, for this past year, my own office has been assisting for a 
full year a veteran with a 36-year-old claim. Due to management 
practices--if you call them practices--at the Oakland Regional Office, 
this veteran still suffers this day from not having his claim properly 
handled. Remember, he is not even eligible yet after 36 years to make 
it on to the secret waiting list for medical care, as in Arizona, to 
then finally graduate to the real list. Hasn't even made that in 36 
years yet.
  The Veterans Affairs Department's mission declares:

       Our values are more than just words--they affect outcomes 
     in our daily interactions with veterans and eligible 
     beneficiaries and with each other. Taking the first letter of 
     each word--integrity, commitment, advocacy, respect, 
     excellence--creates a powerful acronym, ``I CARE,'' that 
     reminds each VA employee of the importance of their role in 
     this Department. These core values come together as five 
     promises we make as individuals and as an organization to 
     those we serve.

  Now, let me underscore we know there are many, many very hardworking 
and caring VA employees out there that want to get results for the 
veterans. Many of them have been veterans themselves. So this isn't to 
impugn all of them. This is about upper management--on a topic that has 
been even one the President has focused on this week--not getting the 
job done and trying to snow us here in the Congress and the American 
people about the results they have been claiming.
  Thanks to a growing group of employees who understands these core 
values I just mentioned and now feel empowered to step forward because 
they see there are people who really want to get behind them, I have 
been given a number of multiple signed, sworn statements by employees 
on what is happening behind the curtain at the Oakland Veterans 
Benefits Administration office.
  Right here on this easel is a statement I received from one of them 
in the letter. It is just one of the few examples that I will read for 
you:

       I am an employee of the Veterans Administration Regional 
     Office in Oakland. I took a photo on May 19, 2014, showing 
     stacks of paper piled on a cart. This paper is actually 
     informal claims going back to the late '90s and 2000s. These 
     claims were not reviewed until November of 2012. These claims 
     continue, to this day, to be a pile of paper on a cart that 
     no one wants to deal with. I was part of the initial project 
     reviewing these claims. My initials are on them from 
     November, 2012.

  Again, this is an employee from the Oakland center.

       Congressman LaMalfa, I want you to know that I am a proud 
     Navy veteran of 10-plus years and looked at the opportunity 
     to work at the Veterans Administration as a chance to really 
     help veterans. In the 5 years I have worked there, I know I 
     have helped people, but there is so much more that could be 
     done. The management at the Oakland Regional Office is 
     concerned about the numbers and not the veterans. Terminal 
     and homeless veterans wait for too long for the help that 
     they need. I believe that there are a lot of wonderful 
     employees that truly want to help but are being directed by 
     management to worry about number control.
       What I don't understand is why they can't be more 
     transparent about the number of claims and the need for more 
     resources. We need more employees to do the job; we don't 
     need new carpet and desks like they just gave us when 
     veterans die waiting for us to do our job. This job is has 
     literally made me sick. I go to work knowing that during my 
     day, I will have to help the veterans in a low-key way and 
     not what I am being told is needed to get the veterans 
     numbers down. This makes me physically ill. I think about all 
     the letters begging for help and we seem to do so little.
       I believe Oakland needs new eyes. I believe we need more 
     oversight. I believe far too many veterans die each day while 
     we worry about what our numbers look like. These veterans go 
     home with me each night in my thoughts and regrets of the day 
     because we seem to do so little.

  This is a small sample of what is happening here, and we have 
additional statements, as well, about what is going on inside the 
Oakland VA, and maybe an example of many of them across the country.
  In this photograph is an example of the files. Right now these are 
waiting in the hallway, and before that, they were found in a broom 
closet where they had been stashed for years. Some of these claims go 
back to the mid-1990s, untouched, only recently discovered, yet they 
still get walked past and not handled. Stacks of them, the filing 
cabinet.

  The next letter is from an Oakland VA employee--a real employee. We 
are keeping their names back for now because we want people to know 
that we are going to help them if they come forward with this 
information:

       In November 2012, myself and several other individuals were 
     given a special project to work. The project consisted of 
     approximately 14,000 claims dating back to 1994 that had 
     never been worked. These claims are considered informal 
     claims because they did not come in on a prescribed form. 
     Informal claims are worked differently. A letter is sent with 
     the correct form later for the veteran to fill out, and when 
     the form is returned, the claim is actually opened to work. 
     If the form is returned within 1 year, if the veteran 
     receives compensation, their benefits then would go back to 
     the date of his first correspondence, the informal.
       We were given these claims to analyze, and very quickly we 
     began to realize that these were not all informal claims but 
     actionable ones, not to mention how old some of them were. So 
     many of the letters that came in were from veterans, or their 
     surviving spouses, who were begging for help at the end of 
     their life, and they never got a reply because they had died 
     by the time we got them. I went home so many nights crying 
     because a veteran or widow had begged for help, and we stuck 
     the request in a four-drawer lateral cabinet--kind of like 
     so--with 14,000 other ones. Each day we were required to 
     report back to our supervisor on the numbers and how they 
     were broken down. If the veteran had already died, it is 
     considered non-actionable and put aside. Whether it actually 
     made it to the veteran's folder is unknown to me.

  Again, this is an Oakland employee:

       If it was an informal claim and the claimant was still 
     alive, those were put in another pile to eventually review 
     again and maybe do the letters. If the document received came 
     from a veteran who had already filed a formal claim, then 
     these would be considered actual claims and be reviewed by 
     another person before being acted upon. So each day we would 
     report our numbers and separate out the documents. We began 
     to speak up about how old these were and why hadn't we acted 
     sooner on them, and we were very quickly removed from the 
     project for speaking out.
       These claims were within feet of the assistant service 
     center manager; she literally walked by them each day, and 
     yet they remained untouched until November 2012. Word was 
     that a staff member from VA headquarters had actually been 
     the one to find them while she was there doing an onsite 
     inspection. And yet several long-term employees have told me 
     that management knew they were there. Either way, most were 
     very old.
       I don't know how many veterans or spouses died before we 
     responded, but, I personally know of several hundreds that 
     got nothing, and the thought of us doing nothing to help 
     these men and women in their most desperate times is haunting 
     to me.

  Again, signed by an Oakland VA employee.

[[Page H4821]]

  A third letter addressed to me states:

       Dear Congressman LaMalf: I cannot thank you enough for the 
     work you and your staff have done--

a big credit to my staff who worked very hard on this--

     for the veterans in the northern California area. One 
     particular case should have been decided with the evidence on 
     hand last year. I read the examination today and found that 
     the exams have been in the system, and there has been no 
     action on that claim for what the system states is waiting 
     for the examinations. The information is there, and the 
     rating should be completed based on the evidence on hand. 
     Please keep advocating for the veterans. I cannot thank you 
     enough. I am a veteran myself who served honorably for over 9 
     years and was not provided the benefits from the VA per the 
     law until I--the veteran who is now an Oakland employee--
     started working for the DVA myself and found out everything I 
     was not informed on.

                              {time}  1345

       I left the U.S. Marine Corps, after serving honorably as a 
     military police K-9 officer and member of the SWAT team. I 
     worked hard and, as a result of my disabilities, required 
     several surgeries and, recently, due to the hostile work 
     environment at work, have become progressively worse.
       I have tried to report this to management, but they did not 
     like hearing the truth and started to make my life at work 
     miserable 2 years ago. The news is starting to pick up on 
     what I have tried, myself, to report regarding unethical 
     conduct in the VA. Prior to the news picking up on the real 
     problems at the VA, I have been reporting this information to 
     the Senate and Congress Members in the Bay Area's district.
       I have reported this to the VA Office of Inspector General 
     on two different occasions. I have reported this to the GAO. 
     I have reported problems at the Oakland VA to the Federal 
     Labor Relations Office of the General Counsel for 2 years, 
     with no assistance.
       I have three EEO claims, with one more in the works, that 
     have not been processed by the VA ethically or morally, 
     according to the applicable laws, up to and including the 
     OEDCA in Washington, D.C.
       I am begging you to please open a formal investigation into 
     the unethical conduct of the VA Oakland regional office.
       The unethical conduct I know of is the fact that the 
     Oakland VA management has not been held accountable for the 
     misconduct or several felony violations that has been 
     recently reported by me.
       Since coming out as a whistleblower, I have had many 
     employees discretely discuss some extremely disturbing 
     information with me regarding what is actually going on in 
     the VA and why the management is trying to stop me at all 
     costs.
       The unethical conduct goes far beyond my employment 
     difficulties at the VA Oakland regional office. I have come 
     to find out that the Oakland regional office is not only 
     lying to Congress about their numbers, but the Oakland office 
     is hiding claims that were received in 1999.
       I have seen these claims in the office as late as May 20, 
     2014. These claims should be in the claims files if there is 
     not action because the veteran has died in the process, not 
     still sitting around the office for over 15 years.
       There are a number of claims that are over a year old. 
     There are many more that have been ``lost in transit'' to the 
     scan sites, often in some other State. The VA is ethically 
     challenged, but this is unacceptable, to lose a veteran's 
     claim and not tell them or try to make the situation right, 
     just ignore them and hope they go away or to not process a 
     claim properly for over 15 years.

  This is a real letter from a real Oakland VA employee. It continues:

       The claims have been sitting for over a year, after having 
     been screened last by a group of VSRs and no action taken 
     because they were sitting in someone's office, then in some 
     storage closet by the director's office on the 17th floor of 
     the Oakland Federal building.
       Again, I have made multiple statements to many agencies of 
     the U.S. Government in hopes that the illegal and 
     unprofessional conduct from the management would stop, but 
     the parties who I have reported to this, with ample amounts 
     of evidence provided, have explained that the corruption 
     cannot be stopped without some sort of ethical investigation 
     conducted.
       Please initiate some type of ethical investigation by an 
     agency that is not going to try to cover up what they find, 
     rather report the truth and do the right thing.
       I have been a law enforcement officer in the U.S. Marine 
     Corps, and I know that what is going on at the Oakland 
     regional office with me and other veterans. It is wrong per 
     the law, not my opinion.
       Please, Congressman LaMalfa, assist us in whatever you can 
     do. The veterans deserve better.

  Semper Fi, USMC Disabled.
  This is what it looks like. There are unfinished files sitting in the 
hallways, previously found in a broom closet.
  Lastly, in a letter from yet another person who stepped forward when 
they finally saw somebody fighting back at different levels, our 
Veterans' Committee and other offices around the country, they see the 
shame being brought upon our veterans and, with that, our country.
  This letter says:

       There are huge amounts of these claims that are quite old, 
     but because they are reclassified, are not worked 
     expeditiously. Lots of these claims go back several years, 
     but they are being worked as if they are only 2 or 3 years 
     old because they are in a different group, and that is not 
     considered a priority.
       A lot of these claims, the 930 series, are review claims 
     created because they found something wrong that we did. 
     Usually, it is not logging in evidence in time before the 
     claim is closed.
       I personally logged in evidence on May 16, 2014, that was 
     received by our regional office and date-stamped August 1, 
     2013. The claim had been closed months before, but because 
     this evidence had not been logged in, it had also not been 
     considered in the decision, which was a denial of benefits. 
     Things like this happen every day.
       Now, we open a review claim that will not get worked for 
     months and, sometimes, a year or more. We have veterans that 
     are terminal and asking for aid and attendants, and you would 
     think that these claims, along with the older date of claims 
     of the homeless, would be worked first, but a lot of the 
     times, they are not.
       If the regional office can do several easy claims, like 
     hearing loss, tinnitus, then they will do that because then 
     more claims are taken off the books, even though these may 
     not be the veterans with the most need.

  So, there, you see manipulation of statistics, manipulation of 
timing, making the numbers look better, and not making the veterans 
feel better.
  I hope that image is one that will stay with you, all who have seen 
this or will see this all across our country. Much more needs to be 
done, not just pretty words, not just press conferences, not we will 
look into it or that we will throw money at it.
  Congress does stand prepared to ensure that there is adequate funding 
to do it right, but we also expect that the dollars that taxpayers send 
to the government are used wisely and efficiently and not for bonuses 
for people that are acting not just ineptly, but, I believe, corruptly.
  It is time to stop rewarding this bad behavior with more 
accountability. Americans have seen these stories. These horror stories 
are demanding a fix for the veterans health care system and their 
benefits. We must also demand an end to the phony claims, phony 
numbers, decades of waiting. It isn't just ineptness or miscues or 
errors. Someone is very deliberate and, I think, worthy of prosecution 
as fraud.
  I thank those VA employees who have been bold enough to step forward 
and let us know about what is going on in the backrooms behind the 
scenes. They are good employees who just want to see veterans served 
all across the country, so we want to hear more of these stories from 
anybody who might be watching or see this all across the country.

  Contact your own Congressman, contact us, contact whoever will listen 
and seek remedies that mean something as we celebrate our fallen 
veterans this weekend. It isn't just about barbecues and skiing and 
picnics. Let's remember and honor these people.
  The system is broken, but it doesn't have to be if we are willing to 
demand accountability and demand it immediately. That is what I am 
about, what my office will be about, my staff, but also many of my 
colleagues that either serve on the Veterans' Affairs Committee or 
don't.
  We will continue to spotlight this and make sure that the stories are 
heard all across the country, and those who are doing this to our 
veterans, these criminal acts, ultimately will be held responsible.
  So I thank the whistleblowers, those VA employees who do care. We 
know there are many, many of you and thank you for your effort. God 
bless our veterans who have suffered and are still waiting and know 
that you have allies in this place who will see this through and get 
you the service you deserve.
  God bless you all. God bless America.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________