Shamed St. Paul VA executive "demoted" to highly desired job at troubled Phoenix VA Regional Office

St Paul Administrator Ms. Kim Graves

By Allison Sherry, Phoenix Star Tribune

WASHINGTON – Embattled former St. Paul veterans benefits director Kim Graves is being moved a lesser (but one still highly desired and richly rewarded) VA job in Phoenix, senior House Veterans Affairs Committee officials said Tuesday.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs said last week that they demoted Graves to assistant director after the department’s Inspector General found she orchestrated a move to Minnesota from the East Coast and received $130,000 in moving expenses. She also kept her high $173,949 salary, even though her VBA responsibilities in St. Paul were greatly diminished.

After the inspector general’s findings, Graves was forced to testify in Washington. She pleaded the Fifth Amendment in front of the committee, in order to avoid making any self-incriminating statements.

The inspector general’s report, which uncovered similar instances of potential misconduct from other administrators, drew intense and bipartisan criticism in Washington, where VA officials have been scrambling to correct the problems.

Top VA officials in Washington reassigned Graves to the assistant director position in Phoenix, a much larger organization, VA officials told the House Committee.

Graves will take a pay cut, too, though will likely make more than $100,000 a year.

Kay Anderson, the current assistant director in St. Paul, has taken over the helm of the regional benefits office.

The VA has not commented on the shuffling and has not taken steps to make Graves pay back her relocation allowance to St. Paul. It was not clear whether she would get another relocation stipend to move to Arizona.

Graves and other administrators identified in the inspector general’s report could still face criminal prosecution.

Allison Sherry • 202-383-6120

"Fixing the VA, A Broken System Thus Far" – comments by Secretary McDonald and Deputy Secretary Gibson

The President, Secretary McDonald and Deputy Secretary Gibson are visiting VA facilities in Phoenix, Arizona this Thursday and Friday. The Arizona Republic, which has uncovered much of the turmoil in VA this last year of scandals, raised questions of these leaders.

Arizona Republic: "You inherited a malignant VA culture with dishonesty in leadership and other problems. How can you trust your subordinates to cure themselves or be honest with you?"

Secretary McDonald: "Ask every employee to recommit themselves to our mission."

Mr. Gibson: Stressed that veterans are poorer, sicker and have more mental-health problems than most patients. "These are not patients that are going to fare well in a fragmented, private-sector care environment."

Mr. Gibson's point is quite clear...veterans need the VA. Which begs the question, why has VA blocked 100% of our eligible C-123 veterans' applications for VA medical care for four years? How can VA claim to be pro-veteran and non-adversarial when it seeks every loophole to bar our care?

ABC Investigation: VA Call Centers BLOCK Most Veterans' Calls

VA scandal: Majority of calls to benefits hotline are blocked; kept from getting through to a representative
reporters: Lauren Gilger, Shawn Martin

The ABC15 Investigators found the majority of veterans calling the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA’s) national hotline are not getting the help they need. Most callers are either getting hung up on or getting a busy signal.

Recently obtained VA documents show that in 2014, 55 percent of calls never got through to a representative. And, so far in 2015, that number is even higher, at 59 percent.

“It's ridiculous,” said Tom Boyle, a three-year veteran of the Navy. He was discharged after being injured in the line of duty.

“I was proud to be a sailor,” said Tom. “A lot of work, a lot of dedication, I just loved it.”

Tom told us he felt marginalized by the VA. He said he has called the hotline over and over again, but, most of the time, can’t get through.

“You wait like 45 minutes to an hour,” said Tom. “I got frustrated and hung up because I can’t get through.”

We found, most veterans or their families calling the hotline for help with their benefits can’t either.
Last November, we interviewed two former call center employees who told us they were fired along with several others because they didn’t meet VA guidelines that require employees to spend less than 10 minutes on the phone with each caller.

“I was mad. I was frustrated and I felt that I was being let down and that I had to go, again, through the whole process of doing what every other veteran does, is call the call center and wait and wait and wait,” said Tom.

He said that it is just not right for a veteran to be disconnected like that.

Tom’s connection to the call center goes deeper than most vets. His wife, Arlene, worked at the call center in Phoenix for five years. There are seven call centers around the country.

She recently took early retirement because she was fed up with how she was asked to treat our country’s vets.

“It's not the veteran's fault. They can't keep enough people staffed in the call centers to answer those phones,” said Arlene.

The VA reported that there are a total of 736 employees of the call centers nationwide, but the department could not provide ABC15 with an exact number of employees charged with answering calls on a daily basis.

The department estimated their management consists of about 10 percent of employees on staff. The VA told ABC15 their attrition rate is 3 percent.

In a statement, a VA representative told ABC15, “Although the number of “blocked” calls – an industry term describing calls that are not connected to a Call Center employee due to a full call queue – is high, demand for information from the National Call Center continues to climb.”

But, according to the VA’s own data, the number of people trying to contact the call center was actually lower in 2014 than in the previous three years.

During that time, the VA told us the department increased staff at all seven call centers nationwide by 30 percent. The number of blocked calls was also slightly lower in that time.

“The bottom line is,” said Arlene, “The government is responsible to have enough people there.”
We asked the Veteran’s Benefits Administration for an on-camera interview, but they declined. They did respond to our requests for information via e-mail.

Click: Department of Veterans Affairs response: (admits most calls are deliberately blocked)

The department told ABC15 they have made significant advancements in how veterans can ask questions since 2009. They created the eBenefits platform and created live-chat capabilities on-line.
Arizona Senator John McCain sent ABC15 the following statement in response to our investigation:

"If true, these allegations further add to the VA’s disappointing history of denying timely and quality care to veterans. While significant steps have been taken to fix our broken VA health care system, including passage of historic bipartisan reform legislation last year, clearly the VA still has a long way to go to earn back the trust of our service members. 

Our veterans deserve to have a department dedicated to helping them in every way possible, and I remain committed to making sure that the VA fulfills its promise to care for all of those who have served.”

WOW...Phoenix Scandals About the Phoenix Scandals?

(from the New York Times, December 23, 2014)

I guess this is why VA doesn't have $$ to replace my lost hearing aids...too much paid to Ms. Helman during her administrative leave, and too many favors extended by her to contractors out to turn a buck on no-bid sole-source overpriced contracts with VA.

Will this ever end?

A federal administrative judge has upheld the dismissal of the director of the Veterans Affairs health care system in Phoenix for accepting more than $13,000 in airline tickets and other gifts from a consultant for the health care industry, for failing to disclose some of the gifts and for placing a high-ranking doctor on administrative leave for providing Senator John McCain with information about patient suicides.

The former director, Sharon Helman, had also been implicated in the falsification of the hospital’s waiting lists for care, a problem at Phoenix and other veterans’ hospitals that roiled the Department of Veterans Affairs this year and led to the resignation of the department’s secretary, Eric K. Shinseki. But the administrative judge, Stephen C. Mish, concluded that the department had not provided sufficient evidence to justify firing Ms. Helman for the manipulation of waiting lists, which concealed delays in providing care to veterans.

Judge Mish also concluded that the department had not proved that Ms. Helman failed to address the bureaucratic problems and personnel shortages that contributed to the large backlog of veterans waiting for primary-care appointments at the facility.

“The press and congressional attention has been on the charges the agency failed to prove,” Judge Mish, chief administrative judge of the Denver field office of the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, said in his 61-page ruling, which was released late Monday. Nevertheless, the judge said he was upholding Ms. Helman’s firing because of “serious financial improprieties” that included accepting airline tickets and an eight-night stay at Disneyland, apparently for her and six family members, from a consultant with clients seeking business with the department.

Revelations about the Phoenix health care system shook the confidence of millions of veterans who use the department’s hospitals and clinics. An investigation by the department’s inspector general found that 1,700 patients in Phoenix had not been placed on proper waiting lists and may never have received medical care, and that the falsification of waiting lists may have led to better performance reviews for the Phoenix hospital’s employees. A top official in the inspector general’s office also testified that delays for care had contributed to some patient deaths.

Ms. Helman appealed her firing last month and in a proceeding before the judge argued that the department had been wrong to base her dismissal partly on a failure to take action or notify her bosses about a backlog of 2,500 primary-care appointments.

After reviewing sworn statements from senior department officials, the judge found that it was “more likely than not (nice shift to VA lingo here!) that at least some senior agency leaders were aware, or should have been, of nationwide problems getting veterans scheduled for timely appointments” and that the Phoenix hospital, “as a part of the nationwide system, also had those problems.”

Judge Mish found that the department had not proved that Ms. Helman failed to take action or notify bosses, and he said it had failed to describe “any particular actions or inactions” constituting misconduct by Ms. Helman related to off-the-books waiting lists.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story

The department issued a statement on Tuesday that said officials were “pleased” because the judge’s decision “helps us begin to put the leadership failures at Phoenix behind us.” The department removed Ms. Helman “based on the available evidence,” it added.

But a lawyer for Ms. Helman, Julie Perkins, said the ruling had upset much of the narrative about what happened in Phoenix and raised questions about who was at fault.

“Sharon was not fired for what Congress and the inspector general alleged that she had done with respect to veterans’ care, and if she’s not at fault, I hope people will question where the blame really lies,” Ms. Perkins said. “The decision says, and the evidence shows, that people in V.A.’s central office knew about these problems and did nothing for years.”

The chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Representative Jeff Miller, Republican of Florida, said on Tuesday that he favored “a detailed investigation into whether V.A. officials in Washington knew about widespread wait time fraud and when they knew it.”

He also suggested that he was concerned by the ruling’s revelation that the department’s inspector general had never interviewed Ms. Helman. (A spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office declined to comment.) Mr. Miller added, “The fact that the ruling did not connect the central figure of V.A.’s wait time scandal to any wait time schemes demonstrates a huge problem with the way this case was handled.”

The ruling suggested that Ms. Helman had at some points been handicapped in the proceeding because she exercised her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Yet the judge was caustic in describing the most serious findings against her, including the appearance of a conflict of interest created by the trip to Disneyland and other gifts.

“Sincerely forgetting about one of the plane rides purchased for her might be understandable in some circumstances, but the notion she actually forgot them all strains credulity,” Judge Mish wrote, adding that Ms. Helman “has little rehabilitative potential.”

Legion Demands VA Leadership Changes Amid Records Falsification Scandals

Amid allegations of fatal treatment delays for veterans at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the American Legion is taking the rare step of calling for the resignation of top VA officials. 

Daniel M. Dellinger, national commander of the veterans group, is planning to make the announcement at 2 p.m. today at the group’s headquarters in Indianapolis. (note: Josh Hicks of The Washington Post reported the Legion today demanded the resignations of Secretary Shinseki, Under Secretary Hickey, and Under Secretary Petzl.)

It’s the first time the American Legion, which boasts 2.4 million members, has called for a leadership change at the VA in more than 60 years. (note: click to read Legion Commander's Op-Ed Letter)

“Senior VA leadership in Washington has demonstrated its incompetence through a series of incidents at VA medical facilities involving preventable deaths of veterans, long wait-times for medical care and other quality-of-care issues, and the awarding of bonuses to senior executives who have overseen such operations,” the group said in a press release. “As the country’s largest organization of wartime veterans, The American Legion believes that VA is a system worth saving, and that the department has reached a point of crisis nationwide that warrants the removal of VA’s top leadership in Washington.”

The call for resignations comes amid reports that scores of veterans have died because of screening and treatment delays at the VA.

Department officials revealed last month that the deaths of 32 veterans were linked to delayed cancer screenings dating back four years.

More recently, a retired doctor, Sam Foote, alleged that 40 other veterans died because of treatment delays at a VA hospital in Phoenix. VA officials says there’s no evidence to support those claims, but the hospital administrator was placed on leave pending an investigation by the agency’s inspector general.

And today, USA Today reported that a VA investigation at one of its outpatient clinics in Fort Collins, Colorado found that clerks at the Department of Veterans Affairs were instructed last year how to falsify appointment records to make it appear the small staff of doctors was seeing patients within the agency’s goal of 14 days.

In a statement Thursday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki said the agency takes the allegations in Phoenix seriously.

“We believe it is important to allow an independent, objective review to proceed,” he said. “These allegations, if true, are absolutely unacceptable and if the (VA) Inspector General’s investigation substantiates these claims, swift and appropriate action will be taken.”

American Legion Decries VA Secret Lists – Launches Special Web Site

The American Legion, our nation's largest wartime veterans organization, is greatly offended by the recent discovery of secret lists for patient care in Phoenix and Fort Collins. Accordingly, the Legion is conducting a Phoenix Town Hall meting on May 13, and has also launched a special web site dedicated to this outrageous problem.

C-123 veterans appreciate the years of support from the Legion and joins with it demanding VA correction of these problems.

Click HERE to enter.

Click HERE for VA Public Affairs Response.

President Obama Orders Investigation of VA "Secret Lists" & Veterans' Deaths

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — President Barack Obama says the U.S. will get to the bottom of whether veterans were denied help they needed at a VA hospital in Arizona.

Obama says he immediately ordered Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to investigate following allegations that up to 40 Arizona veterans died while awaiting medical appointments at the Phoenix VA Health Care Center.

Obama says he takes the allegations, quote, "very seriously." He says an inspector general is also investigating.

Obama says he wants to ensure not a single U.S. veteran lacks the help they need. He says he's increased the VA's budget more than any other agency in his government.

Obama spoke at a news conference in Manila while traveling in the Philippines.