The Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General (OIG) set out to investigate charges of abuse of the VA’s relocation expenses program. The report was published Sept. 28, 2015.
The OIG determined that two senior executives inappropriately used their positions of authority for personal and financial benefit when they participated personally and substantially in creating opportunities for their own transfers to positions they were interested in filling and a third senior executive inappropriately assisted in this scheme. One exec received more than $274,000 in relocation expenses.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. The OIG also uncovered that the agency was manipulating the personnel system so its senior executives could bypass the pay freeze imposed on them. The freeze was prompted by two large scandals – the bogus VA hospital waiting lists that generated unearned bonuses and the massive backlog in processing veteran’s disability claims, some for more than a decade.
Any large agency is going to have individuals who are dishonest, incompetent, or both, but when senior executives collude to negate the penalties for previous poor management the agency itself starts to act like a criminal enterprise.
While some of the rules protecting the paychecks of the senior executives are mind boggling biased in themselves, other actions were clearly illegal in both intent and application. These career employees consistently get away with it because there is a total lack of accountability; hardly anyone ever gets demoted, fired or prosecuted. The government has decided that its employees are more important than the public they are supposed to serve.
After the penalty pay freeze senior VA execs finally went to work – not to fix the agency’s numerous problems – but to figure out a way to get around the pay raise and bonus restrictions.
The scheme they came up with was relatively simple yet ingenious; high ranking execs created lower level job openings at other locations, then volunteered to take those jobs.
Why would anyone volunteer to fill a lower level job? The reasons were threefold. First, executives moving to a lower level of responsibility maintained their previous pay rate provided that they had acceptable performance (question: how can every executive in a failing agency get acceptable marks?). This applied even when the new job was several levels down on the organizational chart and had a much lower pay scale.
Second, the moving exec got to collect substantial relocation payments, including having the government, essentially, pay to help sell their previous home.
Finally, the top-level positions they left were then filled via hand-picked illegally restricted internal promotions and were accompanied by substantial raises and, in several cases, more relocation payments.
Every round of musical chairs increased pay and relocation payments and some reduced responsibility without reducing pay, both a net minus for the taxpayer and a net plus for the executives.
Apparently, everyone was shamelessly in on the scheme; the OIG interviewed Mr. Pummill [director, Veterans Benefits Administration] in May, 2015. When asked whether salary increases and relocation incentives were a way to get around pay freezes and bans on performance bonuses. Mr. Pummill said, “I would say that’s probably true.” He stated further that the VA Chief of Staff at the time said that a senior executive employee’s salary could be increased as long as the executive was moving to a different location.
Twenty-one of the 23 reassignments included salary increases. These reassignments resulted in average annual salary increases of $15,286.
There were many other serious improprieties associated with this scheme such as discouraging others from applying for the openings, failure to announce job vacancies and illegally making retroactive determinations that relocation payments were available.
In other words, the fix was in – but nothing was ever fixed at the VA.