Fort Meade-Based Black Hills Veterans Claims Found in Dumpster

From 1993 to 1999 we had to fight to have my husband's claim approved. It was bad back then when no reporters cared. By the time his claim was approved, we knew there were many, many more it was happening to. It ended up getting worse.


This report came out in 2008 when it was taking 2 to 3 years for an original claim and 4 years for an appeal.

Richardo (Rick) F. Randle, director of Alabama Department of Veteran Affairs, was the guest speaker at the April 19 meeting of the Lower Alabama Veterans Alliance Saturday at Ryan’s in Enterprise. Randle told the filled-to- capacity crowd of LAVA members and guests that staffing is a critical issue with the department, and until more resources become available, staffing will remain a problem. “We are doing the best we can with the resources available to us,” said Randle. “Since 2006, the number of claims has grown 15 percent. The amount of time it takes to make decisions on disability claims is two to three year. On an average, it takes four years to get an appeals decision.”

Later in 2008, part of the reason was clear, the GAO found no accountability and it was taking 2 years to train new VA claims processors.

VA officials said it takes at least two years to properly train disability claims employees, and they must complete 80 hours of training a year. New employees have three weeks of intense classroom training before they begin several months of on-the-job training at their home offices. But “because the agency has no policy outlining consequences for individual staff who do not complete their 80 hours of training per year, individual staff are not held accountable for meeting their annual training requirement,” the GAO found. “And, at present, VBA central office lacks the ability to track training completed by individual staff members.”

THE HOUSE OF Representatives and the U.S. Senate approved legislation in March that would increase the VA budget by $3.2 billion, which is more than what the Administration offered in February. According to the June issue of DAV magazine, this move could set the VA’s total budget at $93.6 billion for 2009, indicating a $5.22 billion increase from this year.

As of March, the VA reported 879,291 claims were in backlog from the same time last year.

And claims were being shredded with numbers being "fudged" as employees lost their jobs, but members of Congress with jurisdiction over the VA kept their jobs.

The first heads have begun to roll in this investigation. During the week of October 6, 2008, four employees at the New York VARO, including the Director, were placed on administrative leave. More accurately, they were removed from their positions awaiting the outcome of the investigation. Sources close to this investigation say that those removed, and others, were found to have been fudging the "timeliness" figures. And, there are allegations that documents, including paperwork essential to the claim process had been destroyed.

November 13, 2008 - A high-ranking U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs administrator from Guilderland has been placed on paid leave in the wake of an investigation into his office.

Joseph Collorafi was suspended last month as chief of veterans affairs at the New York City regional VA office, said Keith Thompson, acting director of the office.

The investigation revealed that someone in the regional office intentionally entered claim documents from veterans with incorrect dates — called "backdating" — into an internal database, VA spokeswoman Alison Aikele said Wednesday.

All that was followed by this piece of news in March of 2009

VA officials acknowledge further credibility problems based on a new report of a previously undisclosed 2007 incident in which workers at a Detroit regional office turned in 16,000 pieces of unprocessed mail and 717 documents turned up in New York in December during amnesty periods in which workers were promised no one would be penalized.

By June it was worse

Crisis at the VA as Benefits Claims Backlog Nearly Tops One Million
Monday, 01 June 2009
By Jason Leopold

During the past four months, the Department of Veterans Affairs backlog of unfinished disability claims from grew by more than 100,000, adding to an already mountainous backlog that is now close to topping one million.

The VA's claims backlog, which includes all benefits claims and all appeals at the Veterans Benefits Administration and the Board of Veterans Appeals at VA, was 803,000 on Jan. 5, 2009. The backlog hit 915,000 on May 4, 2009, a staggering 14 percent increase in four months.

The issue has become so dire that veterans now wait an average of six months to receive disability benefits and as long as four years for their appeals to be heard in cases where their benefits were denied.

Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., a member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said during a hearing in March that the VA is “almost criminally behind in processing claims.”

So, as we've seen, everything old is new again to those not paying attention all along.

Files of 1,100 veterans thrown in dumpster at Hot Springs VA
Rapid City Journal
Seth Tupper Journal staff
July 31, 2015

More embarrassment struck the beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs Friday when it was revealed that files containing personal information on 1,100 military veterans were mistakenly thrown out with the garbage.

Someone tossed a box containing the files into a dumpster on Friday, May 15, during an office move at the Hot Springs campus of the VA Black Hills Health Care System. A different employee noticed the box and files in the dumpster Sunday, May 17, and the items were retrieved and secured by Veterans Affairs police.

The Fort Meade-based Black Hills system, which serves 19,000 veterans residing in South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana, announced the dumpster blunder Friday in a news release. The release did not divulge the number of veterans affected; that information emerged during a Journal interview Friday with Teresa Forbes, public affairs officer for the VA Black Hills.

She said an investigation was conducted, but it did not determine which employee was at fault.

“The investigation found that during a regular office move, that the box of files were inadvertently thrown in the receptacle,” Forbes said. “It was just an unfortunate mistake during an office move.”
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