Claims processors at the Philadelphia VA office, which was identified by a government watchdog as the worst in the country, received bonuses of $300 to $900 each.
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The VA paid out $143 million in performance bonuses to employees in 2014. Managers in the Tomah, Wisconsin, VA facility – dubbed “Candyland” for its over-prescribing of opiates to vets, were awarded $1,000 to $4,000 each. They took home $four, 000 to $eight, 000 every. And in St. Cloud, Minn., where an internal investigation report past year outlined mismanagement that led to mass resignations of health care providers, the chief of staff cited by investigators received a performance bonus of nearly $4,000. “More than 35,000 combat veterans have been waiting as long as seven months to get health care because of a computer glitch”, she said as the crowd groaned.
As one of his final acts a year ago before resigning, then-VA secretary Eric Shinseki announced he was suspending bonuses, but only for senior VA executives. In all, a few 156,000 executives, managers and employees received them for 2014 performance. However, Shinseki only suspended bonuses for executives in the senior level of the VA’s network of hospitals, the Veterans Health Administration. But in the summer of 2014, Congress approved legislation allowing the agency to hand out up to $360 million in bonuses each year.
“Unfortunately, often times the employees VA rewards with thousands in taxpayer-funded bonuses are not the type of people the department should be interested in attracting or retaining”.
“It’s totally not appropriate that they got bonuses,”said Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colorado) who is chairman of the House Veterans Affairs subcommittee on investigation”.
“Rewarding failure only breeds more failure”, he tells the newspaper.
More than 325 were compensated with $5,000 to $13,000 in year-end bonuses, according to data given to the Washington Examiner by the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “Until VA leaders learn this important lesson and make a commitment to supporting real accountability at the department, efforts to reform VA are doomed to fail”. The payments ranged from $8 to as much as $12,705.
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McDonald needs Congress to approve more than $1 billion in a funding increase he requested to help the VA so that it can serve the 23 million veterans in the United States.
