Federal Manager's Daily Report

The Office of Special Counsel has written to the White House to say that the is responding inadequately—including by not taking any disciplinary actions against management officials–to problems with claims processing at the Veterans Affairs Regional Office in Oakland, Calif.

An investigation spurred by whistleblower complaints confirmed that the office failed to process veterans’ benefits claims accurately and timely, resulting in delays that in some cases lasted years, said OSC.

Facility managers “did not provide adequate oversight to ensure timely and accurate processing of informal benefit claims. The report noted that VARO employees did not process fifteen percent of files selected for an audit in an appropriate amount of time. Of the sixty files selected for the audit, nine featured significant delays in processing, ranging from five to more than seven years. While the nine affected veterans eventually received retroactive payments, they waited on average six and a half years for benefits,” the OSC said.

“In addition, the Oakland VARO’s recordkeeping was so poor that investigators could not find logs or spreadsheets tracking the number of unprocessed claims, thus hampering their ability to fully investigate the scope of the whistleblowers’ allegations,” it said, adding that another recent VA investigation confirmed that staff had not processed a “substantial amount” of claims dating back to the mid ‘90s.

In response, the VA has proposed more training and quality assurance reviews but no discipline against managers. Those actions are “unreasonable,” and “do not go far enough to address the systemic problems discovered at this facility,” OSC said in one of its rare letters to the White House.