Judge orders Veterans Affairs to return fired Phoenix boss' performance bonus (NO justice for dead vets)
BY LUKE ROSIAK
The Washington Examiner
Sharon Helman, the disgraced former head of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital, has successfully petitioned a civil service administrative law judge to order the department to repay her a $9,000 bonus that it took back.
Judge Alan R. Caramella ruled Feb. 25 that the government must "return the money it has offset from Ms. Helman's salary until I issue a final decision,"according to documents obtained by theWashington Examiner.Helman led one of many government hospitals that maintained secret waiting lists of veterans seeking treatment. The Phoenix situation drew national attention last year when it was learned that 40 veterans apparently died while waiting for care even as the hospital's top executives reported a sunnier set of treatment scheduling and delivery statistics to Washington.President Obama is scheduled to visit the hospital Friday, where the incident illustrates the difficulty Department of Veterans Affairs leaders have had in enforcing even the slightest punishments on employees responsible for the deadly practices.No one has been fired as a result of the scandal. Helman refused to resign from her $169,000 job, stepping into her Mercedes Benz that was parked in an ambulance zone and ignoring questions from reporters shortly after the scandal broke.The department moved to fire Helman because of the waiting lists, but she appealed to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which ruled in her favor. Helman was ultimately separated from the federal civil service due to unrelated misconduct in which she took trips to Disneyland paid for by a consultant seeking hospital contracts.Veterans officials contend the bonus was only paid to Helman as a result of a paperwork error.Dan Caldwell, legislative director of Concerned Veterans for America, said he interacted regularly with Helman as a Phoenix native and former congressional staffer focused on veterans issues, and that a legal challenge to a comparatively small amount of bonus dollars shows that the veterans affairs bureaucracy views generous compensation as something akin to a birthright."The fact that she has the nerve to stop the recoupment of a bonus that was issued in error is not surprising," Caldwell said. "Helman's mindset is common among many senior VA executives. They do not believe that they are responsible for the misconduct that occurred on their watch, oftentimes with their encouragement.In retrospect, just about everything she told me about the state of the Phoenix VA was a lie."In trying to appeal the bonus rescission, Helman complained that she encountered obfuscation, delays and sloppy records management that forced her to wait until it was too late, recalling practices veterans were subjected to at the government hospital she ran.She tried to gather records to appeal the bonus decision in June, before she was fired. With the deadline for requesting a hearing looming, the central Veterans Affairs office said they didn't have the paperwork she'd need to do so, and referred her to a payroll processor, which said that Veterans Affairs did have the paperwork.By the time the agency sent her some of the documents in August, it had already began docking her pay, and recovered the $5,600 by November.The administrative law judge hearing her appeal said the veterans affairs officials seeking to recoup the bonus money erred by invoking a law that only applied to the Environmental Protection Agency.House Committee on Veterans Affairs Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said department managers have claimed that they haven't fired anybody because union and bureaucratic rules make it too hard, and then resisted expanded powers when Congress offered them."The expanded accountability authority has rarely been used," Miller said.In a hearing before Miller's committee in January, David McLenachen, an acting deputy undersecretary of the department declined to support a bill to enable the government to recover bonuses from employees convicted of felonies.He would say only that "VA is still in the process of formulating views on H.R. 280, a bill to recoup bonuses and awards paid to VA employees."Caldwell noted that when Obama tours the hospital Friday, the person likely to be leading the tour is Darren Deering, Helman's chief of staff, who "sat next to Sharon Helman in all those interviews and said they didn't know about any secret wait lists. Of course, it came out later in the IG report that Dr. Deering was notified about secret scheduling practices."Asked if anyone had been fired because of the wait time scandal, veterans affairs spokeswoman Walinda West did not answer, saying only that two employees have been given "notices of proposed removal."They have now been on paid leave for almost a year, since May 1.###
Curt Cashour
House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
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