Why are officials avoiding those who manipulated VA data?

VA Silent on Exec Bonuses for Manipulated Data
Apr 23, 2013
Military.com
by Bryant Jordan

A year after testifying that some executives received bonuses by manipulating appointment data for veterans needing mental health care, a former Department of Veterans Affairs hospital administrator said officials have avoided the issue “like the plague.”

“They avoid it with a 10-foot pole,” Nicholas Tolentino told Military.com in a telephone interview Monday.

Last April, Tolentino, a former mental health administrator at the Manchester VA Medical Center in New Hampshire, told lawmakers that VA hospital officials across the country talked to each other to find workarounds to meet VA appointment goals. The overriding objective, “from top management on down, was to meet our numbers” and make it appear as if the VA was seeing as many veterans as possible, he said.

Meeting those goals was linked to bonuses for executive career employees, he said. This created “a perverse administrative incentive” for officials to exploit loopholes to meet manufactured goals without providing the services.

“The upshot of these all too widespread practices is that meeting a performance target, rather than meeting the needs of the veteran, becomes the overriding priority in providing care,” he testified.

Tolentino told the Senate that VA officials from across the country discussed ways to get around the system.

“That’s one of the reasons I left,” he said. “Not only because of the fraud. They were gaming the entire system and profiting off it. I left before I got a bonus. I didn’t feel right taking [one].”
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