Lawmakers on a House committee will hear new charges from inside the VA about data manipulation, this time from a whistleblower at the Board of Veterans' Appeals, who is publicly accusing top officials of fudging dates to make it look like veterans were not waiting as long for the disposition of their cases.
"The front office personnel who held cases the longest were not disciplined, but rather were rewarded by bonuses at the end of the year in December 2012, and were also promoted," said Kelli Kordich, a senior counsel at the Board of Veterans Appeals.
Kordich charges in her testimony that after ex-Secretary Eric Shinseki was notified of excessive delays in appeals, officials moved to re-classify the cases in the internal electronic record system - magically making it look like there was no delay at all.
"This had the effect of resetting the calculation of how many days the appeal had languished in one location," Kordich will tell lawmakers, blasting what she said was an agency filled with "increasingly toxic and veteran-unfriendly actions."
"Because of the culture of fear and intimidation cultivated by management, employees find it difficult to express themselves because any form of criticism is met with swift retaliation," Kordich added.
Kordich also described the creation of a "Rocket Docket" to speed through appeals from veterans, saying the terse reviews came "at the expense of veterans."
Senators skeptical about VA report change
Wednesday's hearing on new whistleblower charges comes after Senators spent several hours on Tuesday going over a report on troubles at the Phoenix VA, pressing the new VA chief to make sweeping changes inside the VA.
But Senators also quetioned the acting head of the VA Inspector General's office closely, zeroing in on a line in a recent IG report that said deaths of veterans in Phoenix could not be directly blamed on scheduling and other issues at that VA facility.
Some news reports have indicated that line was not in an initial draft report, and only added after the IG report was reviewed by VA officials; those reviews are standard procedure.
"No one in VA dictated that sentence go in that report, period," said Richard Griffin, the acting IG at the VA.
The line in the final report stated:
"While the case reviews in this report document poor quality of care, we are unable to conclusively assert that the absence of timely quality care caused the deaths of these veterans."
Asked directly about that line, Griffin said his office had not bent to any pressure from above.
"Our job is to speak truth to power, and our record reflects that is what we have always done," the acting internal VA investigative chief added.
But some lawmakers still seemed to wonder why it was in the final version.
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