[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 82 (Thursday, May 29, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H4921-H4922]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        OAKLAND BENEFITS OFFICE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, as the secret waiting lists in veterans 
health care come to light more and more, I implore my colleagues to 
include the benefits administration in the VA as part of this 
investigation. I echo Chairman Miller's statement from yesterday's 
hearing, where he told the witnesses: ``Until VA understands that we 
are deadly serious, you can expect us to be looking over your shoulder 
every single day.'' Count on it.
  I want the Oakland Regional Office to know that I, too, am serious 
and will continue to spend my time and that of my staff to correct the 
claims disaster crushing the veterans in my district. With the help of 
an ever-growing group of whistleblowers at the Oakland VA, we 
absolutely will be looking over their shoulder every single day.
  Claim dates are concurrently being manipulated by the Oakland VA to 
improve their backlog statistics. This is a flagrant disregard of VA 
rules and contrary to the training received by every employee. Because 
of practices like these, thousands of veterans in my district are not 
even eligible for the secret health care waiting lists that we hear 
about, such as in Arizona. Their claims are still pending or summarily 
denied on technicalities prior to full consideration.
  Many of these veterans have more than one claim unanswered. One man 
in my district has a 36-year-old claim, and a secondary claim appears 
to have been deliberately sidelined now for 212 days. Despite these 
facts, the Oakland VA boasts that they have no claims over 125 days 
old. I meet veterans just like this man every day with claims that have 
gone on for years.
  Thanks to a handful of dedicated VA employees working with my office, 
we have learned that these delays are an engineered disaster designed 
to control the VA budget in Oakland. By reducing the claim 
expenditures, Oakland's management has become eligible for bonuses, and 
received them. Withholding benefits for personal gain is perhaps the 
most despicable aspect of the VA scandals.
  Veterans benefits are supposed to be a non-adversarial system. How 
can that be when employees have financial incentive not to process 
claims? Doesn't that explain the endless veteran claims with missing 
records and the staggering delays in processing? It is time to restore 
the VA to a veteran-centered system with real accountability.
  Last Thursday, I made public the statements of whistleblowers 
regarding some 14,000 unprocessed claims at the Oakland office dating 
back to the '90s, as depicted in this poster. We have since heard that 
Oakland VA responded by sending a large number of these claims on a 
swift trip to Manila for ``scanning.'' That is Manila, the Philippines. 
We don't know how many they have sent, and we don't really have an 
accountability for if they were actually sent at all.
  After sitting untouched for years, the fastest process we have is 
scanning these files in the Philippines? How many of these veterans 
have given up on their claims or even died during this period? Were 
these veterans contacted to say their claims have been located?
  Indeed, we hear that the budgeting in Oakland has actually gone for 
new desks, new furniture, and I have even heard spiffing up the 
director's suite with an ungraded or new restroom. We don't have money 
in the budget to buy a scanner so that the claims can be processed 
locally, we have to ship them out of the country? This is the response 
we get for some cases, almost 20-year-old claims sitting on a desk in a 
hallway at the Oakland VA. That is appalling.
  On Tuesday morning, urgent phone calls came pouring into my office 
from Oakland employees who had been working with us who were unable to 
verify these files had actually been shipped. They feared that many of 
them had been destroyed or perhaps hidden once again in a janitor's 
closet or an elevator shaft somewhere.
  I made repeated calls to the Oakland office that afternoon to check 
on this situation. Multiple calls to the interim director, Mr. Hackney, 
have gone unanswered, and we have yet, that I know of, to receive a 
response.
  Every American should be appalled at this broken system. Mr. Speaker, 
it is time to expand our inquiries to the Veterans Administration as 
well to attack these problems from the bottom

[[Page H4922]]

up while we have the opportunity. Remember, without a benefits rating, 
our veterans aren't even eligible to get on the secret waiting list at 
the veterans hospitals.
  This isn't just about Arizona. It is almost everywhere within the 
system. This administration has known about this situation for at least 
a year, yet we hear what we hear. Only now are we really getting to the 
depths of the problem at the VA nationwide.
  With an important national day of remembrance just behind us here in 
Memorial Day, and now we are coming upon the 70th anniversary of D-day, 
the invasion of Normandy, where our heroic troops really started the 
assault on taking back Europe from a regime that was evil, why can't 
we, the way they marshaled those resources to do that huge, huge 
invasion, marshal the resources in this country now to help our 
veterans, in honor of them just past Memorial Day and the upcoming of 
D-day, with missing files? Instead, let's process them.

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