WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs continues to retaliate against whistle-blowers despite repeated pledges to stop punishing those who speak up, a group of employees said Tuesday. One called the department’s office of inspector general a “joke.”
VA whistle-blowers from across the country told a Senate committee that the department has failed to hold supervisors accountable after a scandal over chronic delays for veterans seeking medical care and falsified records covering up the waits.
Shea Wilkes, a mental health social worker at the Shreveport, La., VA hospital, said agency leaders are “more interested in perpetuating their own careers than caring for our veterans.”
Wilkes, who helped organize a group of 40 VA whistle-blowers known as “VA Truth Tellers,” said “years of cronyism and lack of accountability have allowed at least two generations of poor, incompetent leaders to plant themselves within the system.”
“Until we are able to protect whistle-blowers and potential whistle-blowers, the true depth of the corruption within the VA will not be known,” Wilkes said, calling the VA’s office of inspector general a “joke.” The office has not had a permanent leader since December 2013.
Republicans and Democrats on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee called the testimony appalling and urged President Barack Obama to appoint a permanent inspector general at the minimum.
Carolyn Clancy, chief medical officer for the Veterans Health Administration, the agency’s health care arm, said the department’s responsibility to protect whistle-blowers “is an integral part of our obligation to provide safe, high-quality health care. Retaliation against whistle-blowers who have demonstrated the moral courage to share their concerns is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin and the panel’s chairman, said the VA was not living up to those ideals. Whistle-blower retaliation and abuse of authority by management at the Tomah, Wis., veterans hospital “created a culture of fear among the staff that compromised veteran care,” he said. If hospital leaders and the inspector general’s office had listened to whistle-blowers, Marine Corps veteran Jason Simcakoski “may have not been prescribed the lethal mixture of 13 different medications that killed him” last year, Johnson said.
The inspector general’s office completed an investigation of excessive opiate prescriptions at Tomah last year but closed the case without sharing findings with the public or Congress.
Five months later, in August 2014, the 35-year-old Simcakoski died in the hospital’s short-stay mental health unit from “mixed drug toxicity” that included taking 13 prescribed medications in a 24-hour period.
