The House has approved legislation that would prevent senior executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs from receiving performance pay.
The ban on bonuses – included in an amendment offered by Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas – was approved as part of the VA appropriations bill. It was approved not long after the department’s inspector general began an investigation into a report that 40 veterans had died while awaiting treatment from the Phoenix VA Health Care System.
Rep. Huelskamp, who sits on the Veterans Affairs Committee, decried a “lack of accountability” at the department and criticized VA secretary Eric Shinkseki for not punishing employees for delays in care and benefits determinations. (Shinseki has exercised his discretionary authority over bonuses by withholding them entirely from senior executives in the Veterans Benefits Administration.)
The bonus ban on all VA senior executives, prompted a statement from the Senior Executives Association, calling the amendment “unnecessary,” and pointing out that it punishes even high performing executives at the department, many of them veterans themselves. “SEA urges Congress to move away from the distracting rhetoric about senior executives and to instead focus on the drivers of the backlog and access to care,” the statement said.
The VA announced recently that it has cut the disability backlog roughly in half over the past year – partly as a result of mandatory overtime even while other agencies were furloughing workers. As of March it stood at 344,000 claims. A spike in the backlog occurred in March 2011 because of a need to re-adjudicate 150,000 previously decided cases involving exposure to the Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange.
