Well, it seems Veterans Affairs is once again back in the news. The department has been engulfed in a sea of scandal of mismanagement and malfeasance, which also showed the public not only the deplorable conditions many veterans face when receiving health care, but a window into how a single-payer system might operate. It’s not good. For starters, there was the waiting period fiasco, which was so deep and bungled that the VA inspector general said it was possible that over 300,000 veterans may have died whilst waiting for their appointments. More stories like this continue to pop up. Last June, it was reported that nearly 100 veterans died while waiting for health care at the Los Angeles VA hospital, though the delays did not cause their deaths per se. It’s still an appalling story.
Twenty veterans commit suicide every day. Oh, and on top of all of this, come reports that the VA had hired medical workers with revoked medical licenses for years. And now, in Denver, Colorado, a VA office didn’t do any work for a year, according to a whistleblower (via KDVR):
Imagine making close to $100,000 a year and having nothing to do at the office.
It's what Denver whistleblowers say was reality for employees at the local Office of the Inspector General for Veterans Affairs.
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"These are your tax dollars that are paying the salaries of these individuals to sit in an office and do absolutely nothing all day," said one anonymous whistleblower to the Problem Solvers.
"After a while it became a joke," is how a second whistleblower described it.
"Come into work and pretty much staring at the wall all day kind of just hanging out every day pretty much with nothing to do."
Both whistleblowers filed complaints with the Office of Special Counsel in Washington, stating an office of 11 employees basically did no work from April 2017 to April 2018.
The combined salaries of those employees during that time frame totaled more than $1.2 million.
"Long lunches, I mean watching movies, reading books. I mean I was doing school work. I`m not going to lie I did not have any work assigned. I spent the majority of my time doing school work," said whistblower No. one, who happened to be a paid intern making $47,214 a year to help conduct information technology audits.
The Trump administration has taken steps to streamline the accountability process, and they’ve fired bad employees, but it’s evident that a lot more work needs to be done.