Nobody show Janice Murphy or Jim Wright this story.They might blow a gasket. I know I nearly did.
Seems that some soldiers in upstate NY were actually able to get listed as disabled and strangely enough then got medical and other care that was promised to them. Well, we can't have that. So the Army dispatched a Tiger Team (business consultants in uniform) to find out just what the heck was happening. Turns out the helpful people at the VA were assisting those soldiers in their applications so that they would say the proper things in the proper ways on the proper forms to qualify for the assistance they need. Notice that nobody, anywhere, is saying the VA told soldiers to lie, or to misrepresent their injuries and disabilities. But then that means the Army and the Pentagon would actually have to (I debated about making this family friendly, I decided not to) fucking do the honorable thing and pay to help these soldiers. So the Tiger Team instructed (without actual authorization or, apparently, without legal standing) the VA to cease and desist and the VA complied. Spineless
If it had been me, I would have told the Tiger Team, their Adjunct or commanding offer, and their base/team commander on the proper forms, with the proper decorum, and in no uncertain terms, exactly what they could do with that order. Let's just say it would be obscenely biological.
2 comments:
This part of the article is quite telling:
Tom Pamperin, deputy director of the VA's compensation and pension service, believes VA officers are not qualified to help with soldiers' disability paperwork.
"We do not train our employees in the intricacies of the Defense Department's disability evaluation system, so we would feel that it would be inappropriate for our employees to apply VA standards to a Defense Department process," Pamperin says.
If the process is so confusing that your own administrators aren't qualified to explain it, that means its purposely set up to deny vets their benefits.
Yeah, when I read that line I started cracking up. Because of the point you made and the fact the reason the Tiger Team was dispatched was that many vets were successfully filling out the paperwork and getting benefits with the help of those very people the deputy director was claiming were completely unqualified to help.
Hmm, logic, he's doing it wrong.
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