and is vulnerable to fraudMoved by a huge tide of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress, Congress has pressured the Department of Veterans Affairs to settle their disability claims quickly, humanely, and mostly in the vets’ favor.
The problem: The system is dysfunctional, an open invitation to fraud. And the VA has proposed changes that could make deception even easier.
PTSD’s real but invisible scars can mark clerks and cooks just as easily as they can infantrymen fighting a faceless enemy in these wars without front lines. The VA is seeking to ease the burden of proof to ensure that claims are processed swiftly.
At the same time, some undeserving vets have learned how to game the system, working the levers of sympathy for the wounded and obligation to the troops, and exploiting the difficulty of nailing a surefire diagnosis of a condition that is notoriously hard to define.
“The threshold has been lowered. The question is, how many people will take advantage of that?” said Dr. Dan G. Blazer, a Duke University psychiatrist who has worked with the military on PTSD issues.
PTSD, he adds, is “among the easiest (psychiatric) conditions to feign.”
Mark Rogers, a longtime claims specialist with the Veterans Benefits Administration, agrees.
“I could get 100 percent disability compensation for PTSD for any (honorably discharged) veteran who’s willing to lie,” said Rogers, a Vietnam-era vet who is now retired. “I just tell him what to say and where to go.”
Some claims are built on a foundation of fake documents. In other cases, the right medals and a gift for storytelling secure unearned benefits. Consider:
• Persian Gulf War veteran Felton Lamar Gray told a VA psychologist he was spattered with “blood and chunks of head” when his “best friend” was shot in the face in Iraq. But only after the VA rated Gray 100 percent disabled did anyone check into his stories and discover the comrade he spoke of is very much alive — and said he barely knew Gray.
• Thomas James Barnhart is a Coast Guard veteran who used forged documents to convince VA doctors that he was an elite, much-decorated Navy SEAL. Barnhart’s tales of daring rescues and of cradling a dying helicopter pilot in his arms won a congressman to his cause and helped him get a 30 percent PTSD disability rating from the VA before he was outed by a watchdog group.
• Vietnam-era veteran Keith Roberts said he was traumatized when he was prevented from rescuing a friend being crushed under a Navy airplane, and he was eventually granted 100 percent disability. When the case was reopened, investigators could find no evidence that Roberts was even present when the accident occurred.
Each of these cases represents potentially millions of dollars in tax-free benefits over the veteran’s lifetime.
“There’s pressure from the public to sympathize with veterans and treat them with respect,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig J. Jacobsen in Roanoke, Va., who prosecuted Barnhart and has handled other such “stolen valor” cases.
“And you don’t want to go questioning their stories unless you have a very good reason to do so. . . . So I think it’s hard to sift out the phonies from that.”
