Legion to Congress: VA needs to restore trust, accountability
Roscoe Butler, deputy director of the Legion’s Veterans Affairs & Rehabilitation Division, testified during a Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing Sept. .

Legion to Congress: VA needs to restore trust, accountability

Reacting to scandals within the Department of Veterans Affairs last year, Congress continues to enact and introduce legislation that enables the VA to terminate the employment of executives and other employees who have committed crimes or engaged in wrongful behavior.

The American Legion testified during a Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing Sept. 16, imploring members of the committee to allow the VA to restore accountability with veterans and suggested further measures to show that there are consequences for those who are responsible for the degradation of the health-care system.

Several pieces of pending legislation were introduced during the hearing, including VA’s Accountability to Veterans Act of 2015 and Equitable Employee Accountability Act of 2015.

“Accountability within VA is a concern to all veterans,” said Roscoe Butler, deputy director of the Legion’s Veterans Affairs & Rehabilitation Division during testimony he presented on behalf of the Legion. “Although we’ve seen VA move to react to last year’s scandals, we know that veterans in the communities are still frustrated about a perceived lack of consequences for those responsible for the failures.”

Scarcely used, the Veterans Access to Care and Accountability Act has yet to live up to its intended purpose of showing that there are consequences for those who manipulate the system to their benefit, and to the detriment of the veterans they serve, Butler noted.

“We shouldn’t need new laws to terminate VA employees if they are committing crimes. VA should already have that authority,” he said.

The American Legion believes it is important to ensure there is accountability at all levels within VA and that the process is completely transparent.

During his testimony, Butler suggested putting less emphasis on micro-managing the VA and how they impose quote rationing on their managers.

“Working toward arbitrary quotas and numbers is perhaps what led to VA’s problems in the first place,” he said. “The VA can restore accountability by becoming directly accountable to the veterans in the community and engaging with them – showing them step by step the measures they’re taking to right the mistakes when a medical system fails our veterans.”

While The American Legion applauds the end goals of the pending pieces of legislation, there is more work to be done to make sure more layers are not being added to a bureaucracy when layers need to be stripped away to enable more direct accountability, Butler said.

Butler also voiced The American Legion’s support for other pending bills.

The Veterans Affairs Emergency Medical Staffing Recruitment and Retention Act intends to provide much needed flexibility for staffing, allowing VA facilities to implement staffing models that align with current medical practices. Government regulations regarding hourly staffing make VA shift planning far more difficult than comparable civilian medical centers.

“Doctors and nurses don’t keep to the same schedules as 9 to 5 office workers,” Butler said. “This is a common sense fix that will help with staffing, particularly as emergency rooms have had to close because of staff scheduling issues. It makes sense to staff VA facilities as you would other medical facilities.”

Also aimed toward alleviating staffing burdens, the Veterans Hearing Aid Access and Assistance Act of 2015 would enable the hiring of hearing aid specialists who could take some of the workload off the audiologists and still deliver the needed care to veterans.

According to VA’s own figures, veterans attended over 903,000 appointments for audiology services in fiscal year 2014. This area of treatment is growing, as hearing loss and tinnitus are the two most prevalent service-connected disabilities, and yet not all required services need a full time audiologist.

“This is a small fix, but could potentially have a big impact on this large and growing segment of the veterans population,” Butler said.

Concluding his testimony, Butler conveyed The American Legion’s commitment to working with the committee to ensure impactful legislation is passed.