[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 32 (Wednesday, February 25, 2015)]
[House]
[Page H1120]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     SERVING OUR NATION'S VETERANS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, the Veterans Affairs Office of the 
Inspector General issued a report last Wednesday on their investigation 
into the nearly 14,000 veteran benefits claims that were found in a 
filing cabinet in Oakland, California.
  Last year, these claims were brought to our attention by VA staff 
members, who have known about these claims for many years--despite 
their best efforts to raise awareness of the injustice in how these 
claims were being handled.
  In July 2014, the former Deputy Under Secretary of the VA for Field 
Operations testified before the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs 
that the 14,000 claims that were found in a file cabinet had been 
brokered so that they would receive attention by the VA's highest 
performing offices.
  Just 2 weeks prior to that on a site visit to the Oakland VA, the 
regional and division management told me that these 14,000 claims 
basically never existed. As a matter of fact, they claim it was a story 
made up by disgruntled employees.
  The VA's Office of Inspector General's investigation confirmed the 
discovery of 14,000 claims in a filing cabinet, confirmed that some of 
these claims dated back to the 1990s, confirmed that thousands of these 
claims had not been processed, and confirmed that the staff at the 
Oakland VA had not been directed to properly store these claims.
  Oakland VA's management claimed after my visit that they then had 
discovered 13,184 veteran benefit claims and 2,155 claims which 
required action or review. But during an onsite review, the Office of 
Inspector General could not confirm the existence of these claims due 
to the Oakland VA management's ``poor recordkeeping practices.''
  How was the Oakland VA able to arrive at such exact numbers without 
maintaining records that allowed the OIG to verify the existence of 
these claims? It just doesn't make sense, and we have to get to the 
bottom of these numbers. The VA is required by law to respond to every 
initial claim they receive, to safeguard Federal records, and to 
protect private information of the veterans they work with.
  When the Oakland VA managers discovered that 2,155 claims were more 
than several years old and required action or review, a special 
projects team was formed to complete this urgent task. Members of this 
team have told my staff that many of those claims belonged to veterans 
who had passed away while waiting for benefits to be processed and that 
their families were never contacted.
  Inexplicably, the Office of Inspector General later discovered that 
537 initial claims that had been marked by this special team as 
processed were never actually processed. Some of these claims were as 
old as June 2002, yet another troubling instance of the Oakland VA 
managers failing to provide the type of service northern California's 
veterans deserve.
  The VA Office of Inspector General viewed only 34 of these 
unprocessed claims, though for some reason they declined to select a 
random sample. Instead, the 34 claims were selected ``judiciously,'' 
which didn't make any sense. Of the 34 claims that were reviewed by the 
Inspector General's office, seven still remain unprocessed. In fact, 
though, these claims had been reviewed several times from December 2012 
to June 2014 without any action being taken. In one instance, a veteran 
with PTSD was underpaid almost $3,000 because his initial claim was not 
processed correctly.
  This type of dysfunction and complete lack of oversight and 
accountability cannot continue in Oakland or at any VA regional offices 
across the country.
  Sadly, this report sheds very little light on who should be 
accountable for these failures and is incomplete.
  I am grateful the report was done and that the inspector general did 
delve into this issue at Oakland and many other offices, but the fact 
that no real conclusions were made on who is to be held accountable 
means much work remains to be done. We must continue to search for 
these answers and work to make sure the VA regional offices are 
properly serving our veterans.
  I am also grateful, on the positive, for the many staff members of 
the VA--many, former veterans themselves--who care about this. They 
process many of these claims and make sure veterans are served. But we 
see there are a lot of holes in the system, obviously, that are making 
many veterans not have the confidence that they are going to be served, 
that they are going to get their claims processed, or indeed get health 
care if they need it later.
  Indeed, the tragedy we have is that anywhere from 12 to 22 veterans 
give up each day in this country and commit suicide. Because they have 
no hope left of having the promise kept to them shows that we have much 
to do.
  So I am grateful for those VA staffers that come to us blowing the 
whistle on what is wrong with the system when they can't get help from 
their management to make things right. We ask them to please keep 
coming forward.
  Contact my office, contact my staff on what needs to be done to get 
the word out to help make this right, because we want the VA to 
function well. We want the employees to feel like they are part of a 
system that is serving veterans and to have a good relationship within 
their office, but also to ultimately serve what we need as taxpayers 
and Americans that revere our veterans.

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