Addressing the Washington Conference, the Department of Veterans Affairs deputy secretary vows to do what's best for veterans in any future disciplinary matters.
Department of Veterans Affairs Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson tried to reassign two senior VA executives who were accused of, in a VA Inspector General report, pocketing more than $400,000 in moving costs for questionable job moves. But Gibson’s attempts were thwarted by a Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) ruling, and on Feb. 22 the deputy secretary announced the pair would stay in their current cities of employment.
Addressing The American Legion’s Annual Washington Conference Feb. 23, Gibson said that ruling still doesn’t sit well with him.
“As you look at my decisions that have gone to the MSPB, it seems as though I’m batting both 1.000 and zero,” Gibson said. “In the last three cases, the judge sustained the charge, and at the same time in all three cases the judge deemed my punishment unreasonable.
“All three of these were handled as all of our senior executive serious disciplinary matters are handled: using the additional authority that Congress gave us under the Choice Act. I don’t believe that kind of overturning of the discipline is consistent with congressional intent. That puts us in an extraordinarily difficult position when we have senior executives that have committed misconduct, the charges have been sustained, and they’ve been returned."
Gibson said he’d do the best he can to do the right things for veterans in every one of those instances. But he also said that mass firings aren’t the way to reform VA.
“You can’t fire your way to excellence,” he said. “To turn any organization around you have to inspire people to do better. You have to recruit and retain great talent.
“We are holding people accountable (and) firing those that warrant it – more than 2,000 over the last 18 months for poor performance or misconduct. We also take other disciplinary actions that are appropriate for the offenses and supported by the evidence. And then we hope it will withstand appeal.”
Gibson said the employees covered in the media don’t represent VA employees as a whole. “(VA Secretary Bob McDonald) and I have visited hundreds of VA facilities in less than two years,” he said. “We visit with front-line staff at every single facility, and I’ll tell you what we find: We find employees that care deeply about our mission, that do the right thing, and work hard every day to serve and care for our veterans.”
VA has begun setting up kiosks in its medical centers that ask the question, “How satisfied are you that you got today’s appointment when you wanted it?” Gibson said in the past several weeks, nearly half a million patients have responded.
“Eighty-nine percent said either ‘satisfied’ or ‘completely satisfied,’” Gibson said. “Less than 3 percent said ‘dissatisfied’ or ‘completely dissatisfied.’ Now I’m not happy that we got nearly 3 percent that are saying they’re dissatisfied. That means we’ve got work to do. But I’ve got to believe that if I could look at that statistic for the private sector, I’ve got a hunch that that would compare pretty favorably.”
Gibson addressed a recent USA Today story reporting that some calls to VA’s Veterans Crisis Line went to voicemail. “What the article didn’t say was that the (Inspector General) report that the article was based on was based on two-year-old data,” he said. “It didn’t talk about the staffing increases. It didn’t mention the Crisis Line’s changing leadership that, quite frankly, I put in place. It didn’t go into the added space, the extra training, the improvements in call center technology.
“One of the things I would ask you as you take on some of that additional context: Think about that the next time you read an article in the paper. There is, most of the time, an awful lot more to the story than what you see reported.”
Gibson admitted there still are issues with the disability claims backlog but said the average days pending for a claim now is down to 91 days and the actual inventory of claims is the lowest it’s been since 2008.
“All of us, we want to see the backlog come down some more,” Gibson said. “We want to see appeals decisions made more timely – especially those in the early stages. We want to see dependency claims expedited and cleared more quickly. I want them to answer the darn telephone when it rings.”
Gibson said the appeals process is complicated and needs an overhaul. The average processing time for an appeal is three years for VBA and five years for the Board of Veterans Appeals (BVA). In 2015, BVA was still adjudicating a 25-year-old appeal that had been decided 27 times.
“There are many that have been out there for 15, 20, 25 years that have been decided dozens … of times,” Gibson said. “I do not believe that’s the right thing for veterans or for taxpayers. I think veterans deserve an appeals decision within a year of filing a Notice of Disagreement.”
Work remains, Gibson said, “to ensure that every veteran gets the kind of experience that we all want the veteran to receive. But we are making progress.”
- Washington Conference