DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — The Department of Veterans Affairs has reassigned an Atlanta-based national director and her subordinate after a Channel 2 Action News investigation into racially-charged instant messages.
The move comes the same day the agency’s inspector general slammed the office that director helped lead.
Between those reassignments we confirmed today, and this audit, it’s a one-two punch for the VA’s health eligibility center in DeKalb County and all the veterans it serves in metro Atlanta and across the country.
“It’s the most aggressive report we’ve ever seen from OIG,” said longtime Department of Veterans Affairs whistleblower Scott Davis take on a scathing inspector general’s report hammering the agency’s health care enrollment system. “The Inspector General has stepped up and put out a report showing enrollment operations at most of the hospitals at VA are in a state of disarray.”
The Veterans Health Administration and its embattled health eligibility center in DeKalb County oversees the health care enrollment process for millions of American veterans.
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But auditors found, “VHA did not have reasonable assurance that veterans would receive proper consideration or consistent and timely enrollment decisions at VA medical facilities nationwide.”
"What the report basically states is there is no process nationally for enrolling veterans into VA health care," Davis told Channel 2 investigative reporter Aaron Diamant.
Instead, more than 90 percent of all veterans’ health care applications are processed at individual VA medical facilities, but auditors documented mismanagement, poor oversight and a lack of training.
“These practices delayed, or in some instances may have inadvertently prevented, obtaining available evidence to validate the applicant’s eligibility for VA health care,” the report said.
“I think we have to go back to putting veterans first and realize that our jobs at VA, our first priority should be focusing on veterans. Whether it causes us embarrassment as an agency so be it,” Davis told Diamant.
VA leaders would not speak with Diamant on camera Tuesday.
Instead, the agency’s press secretary referred Diamant to the part of the report outlining a series of fixes scheduled to be in place by early to mid-2018.
Cox Media Group
