“VA claims pace lagging: ‘Improper denials, poor service to vets’”
Former VA employee James G. Bo Maske writes congress accusing top administrators of the VA’s Jackson Regional Office of purposely “allowing the regional office to fail.”
VA claims pace lagging: ‘Improper denials, poor service to vets’
Maske is a former legislative assistant to the late U.S. Rep. G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery, the man for whom Jackson’s VA hospital is named. Maske was also a staffer on the House Veterans Affairs Committee during his tenure on Montgomery’s staff.
“I feel in my heart that (Montgomery) would want me to do this for our veterans and for the dedicated employees,” said Maske. “Here’s my concern at this point - the VA’s motto in training employees is ‘grant when you can, deny if you must’ in deciding on veterans’ claims. My fear is that for a powerful few at the VA’s Jackson Regional Office, it’s becoming ‘deny when you can, grant if you must’ and that’s just wrong.”
The Article goes on to note:
An internal white paper produced by the VA’s Jackson Regional Office on March 28 obtained by The Clarion-Ledger outlines an inspection of veterans’ claims folders by Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee special projects counsel Mary Ellen McCarthy. McCarthy made a two-day visit to the Jackson office on March 26-28 to examine the “consistency and quality” of the handling of claims ratings. The Senate committee staffer’s findings included:
# In post traumatic stress disorder claims, McCarthy found “a pattern of improper and excessive development of stressors” (events or circumstances that cause traumatic stress) and that the VA “ignores valid information contained in the files” which results in “improper denials and poor service to veterans.”
# A PTSD claim was denied to an Operation Iraqi Freedom combat veteran because the veteran failed to return information on a specific VA form, but that the information requested was already contained in the veteran’s claims folder.
# The staffer found the Jackson VA office “lax on quality” and told VA personnel in Jackson that if the agency would “slow down” and be more thorough it would “get it right the first time and not have to re-work” claims.
# That in order to meet the VA’s system of “production quotas” to process claims, several failures resulted in “quick denial syndrome to achieve production.”
In order to correct the delays in processing veterans’ disability claims Congressman Tom Allen of Maine has introduced a comprehensive piece of legislation called the Full Faith In Veterans Act.
You can read more about the Full Faith in Veterans Act of 2008 here.
