VA Accountability — The Dirty Truth

A common phenomenon when you make big changes to deal with small problems, is the emergence of what I like to call “The Law of Unintended Consequences.”

Thanks to a few morons in leadership roles at the VA, waiting lists were established, delaying critical patient care. At Veterans Benefit Administration, a few gals who were very fond of each other forced other senior managers to move so they could get the VA to pay for their relocation costs and move to the Midwest together and collect their six figure salaries.

Like any organization, we have our share of bad employees. I would probably go so far to say that statistically, we are on par with private sector ratios of good to bad employees. But in an election cycle, candidates need issues to attack, so it was the VA’s turn in the fishbowl.

The solution that was crafted was the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act — and just to be clear, the “whistleblower” part was thrown in like lipstick on a pig.

It sounded good. A law that got rid of bad employees faster. But here comes that other law — the unintended consequences part.

What did this act do? Several really awful things that impact good employees who are targets of management:

1. Cut down the due process period for proposed adverse action — bad employees were perceived as gaming the system as they attempted to defend themselves against discipline, so rather than addressing that the VA stripped all employees of their rights.
2. Reduced the time that the Merit Systems Protection Board had to challenge adverse action. MSPB is really the only venue where an employee can get bad things reversed and their jobs back.
3. Eliminated “Performance Improvement Plans” VA wide. PIPs were good things — it gave employees 90 days to get back to a “fully successful” status through mentoring and additional training, and gave management the ammo they needed to defend a removal if someone just wasn’t cutting it.
4. Terminated Labor Management Forums — the only place where Labor had a chance to sit at a table with leaders of the VA and present positive ideas for change.

And the most significant change of all?

It allows, under the color of law, the VA to abandon adherence to a signed collective bargaining agreement.

Here is how that has impacted VBA:

1. Jobs at VBA can be VERY hard to master — you need to be a whiz at financial calculations, learn the Manual Reference — the bible for processing claims, and you need to be able to understand how to process claims that have moving parts and applying constantly changing interpretations of the Manual Reference. Under the Contract, you had a long training period — which is necessary — to become proficient. Now? 60 days. That’s it. Want a job at VBA? You had better hope your mother read you the Manual Reference in utero, instead of playing Mozart.
2. VBA employees are held to three critical standards — Workload Management, Quality and Production. Workload Management is this nifty thing that is very dependent on the style and manner that your “Coach” distributes the work. Quality — if you are a GS10, you need to maintain an 85% accuracy rate. Production? Claims have different point weights — a GS10 needs 14 points per day — under the contract, that was measured as an annual or fiscal year rolling average. That meant if you had a bad month in any category, as long as your averages were good — no problem. Under VA Accountability — to hell with averages — management looks at your numbers month to month. Death in the family? Mental health issues? One bad month and a fully successful 10 year employee could be looking for work.

I can speak from experience — Friday’s at a particular VBA Regional Office look like migration of lemmings — with new trainees with less than 60 days under their belts, walking with boxes of their personal items to their cars and driving to the unemployment office. Learning these jobs requires far more than 60 days — thank God I hadn’t been hired under these rules. Trainers at the VBA will tell you that it takes a good three years just to become competent.

So when David Shulkin runs around to the DVA speakers tour, or goes on the radio to talk about “performance and accountability” at the VA, the question that the media should be asking is this — after you remove all the employees who really know how to work Veterans claims, who will be left to do all the work?