VA offices in Baltimore and Philadelphia hid claims, mail

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Hot Air:

Ed Morrissey

July 14, 2014

 

The VA scandal continues to unfold, although primarily through local and regional reporting, demonstrating that the issues of corruption and bureaucratic fraud go beyond just wait lists. Today, Congress will make public the testimony from an Inspector General agent, and it’s not pretty. The IG found that mail and claims were hidden in two separate VA systems, and in Philadelphia the postmarks go back to 2011, and claims were redated to hide their age:

 

Two whistleblowers say the reforms since the scandal broke open are just window dressing:

 

 

 

Two whistle-blowers who work at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Regional Office, where the offenses were discovered, described the process the same: “cooking the books.”

 

“They’re hiding the real numbers from the people and saying, ‘We’re catching up to the backlog,’ ” said Ryan Cease, 31, who has worked at the Germantown facility for about five years. “But they’re not. They’re just hiding it.”

 

 

These revelations came almost two months after the exposure of the wait-list fraud. The IG received the tip from a whistleblower on June 18, long after one would have assumed that VA executives would have demanded an accounting from the bureaucracies that report to them. By June 18, Eric Shinseki had been gone for nearly three weeks, and before that both Shinseki and the White House repeatedly assured Congress that they were taking immediate action to clean up the corruption with the Department of Veteran Affairs. In fact, it came three weeks after the White House tried blaming the Bush administration for the problem, too.

 

(Snip)

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