Represents an original claim with less than eight issues. I i say an o2o that represents a claim that the veteran submitted after he submitted an original claim. You only get one original code and everything is an input from there. You have use 930 from there and that is rate decisions that were prematurely decided. It doesnt include a rating bundle. So the 930s which the majority of them are claims that were rated prematurely and they are not counted in this inventory of blacklog claims. That is just one example. Anyone else wish to comment . I agree with them. I dont have as much experience with that sort of processing because i worked the rating side but i agree. Question for the panel. Starting with ms. Soto. Can reacting secretary, mr. Gibson, succeed with the current vba leadership or should we hold this current vba leadership accountable and start with new leadership . Can the acting va secretary succeed with this leadership . My answer would have to be i dont know. They have been in office for some time now. If the problems are still persisting it is time for a change. That is my opinion. No. Maam, would you like to respond . I think the people under the secretary are letting the under secretary down. I dont think they are being truthful to the under secretary about the Regional Offices. I feel someone is responsible for the va and all of the problems but in my office there are far too many people to hold accountab accountable. Thank you for your testimony. Mr. Soto, i understand you worked at this office for four years, is that correct . Yes, sir. Had you served the va in this capacity prior to other offices . Yes, but i prefer not to discuss that. I want to get a sense of how long your served the va . 15 year i have been a government employee. All at the va . No. How long at the va . Ten years. And mr. Robinson, you have been at the office nine years, did you serve at the va in other capacities . I have been in the columbia va office for 18 years. And the past nine years you have been in the current capacity you are in now . Yes. Ms. Ruell . I worked at the va for seven years this august 20th. Lets just start with you ms. Ruell. Has the situation with these metrics and management measurement, which is focused on concern outcomes in which could only be described as preverse incentives, have they existed for the last seven years . Yes. So there wasnt a time that was better . No, our office used to ha have we started doing original claims a few years after i got there so philadelphia didnt have as much jurisdiction. We had a lower volume of claims and i believe we were able to give more times to the claims. We didnt have to know how to do so many different types of claims because each claims has so many rules and laws that go with it. If you have 1520 types of claims it is like being a lawyer with 1520 specialties. So the more claims that philadelphia has i have noticed it is much harded to know more laws for all of these types of claims. They grew in complexity and variety since you got there. Is that what you are saying . I believe you can never figure out how complex a claim is. Sometimes people think this is a small folder so it should be fast. Because each veteran Service Representative is responsible for doing so many claims and doing them perfectly the more we inherit the less democrat i believe it is. Can you tell me something about what kind of performance bonuses were available to employees at your grade level . Our grade level you had to achieve a rating higher than fully successful to get a bonus. So if you received an outstanding or excellent you got a small bonus of a couple hundred dollars for the entire year . Yes. What was at stake for employees at your levels . Maybe a couple hundred . Yup. Mr. Robinson, can you answer . In my office the bonuses were up to 2,000 and over. They had three ways that you could get a bonus. It was production, they had a numbering system 13. If you got a 3 or a 9 you would get a higher bonus and you would get three for production, three for accuracy and three for auto support. It was over 2,000. It was based on grade so the higher the grade the more money you got. Mr. Soto . Similarly. We had outstanding and they are supposed to be given based on a point structure. The lower level employees that didnt receive points were declared successful. A few employees were given outstanding without reaching the outstanding criteria and the middle group that made production and accuracy were lumped in and made fully successful but no use of the unique appraisal. Thank you. There are different ways to file claims at the va. One way to inquire is to file a program through iris. And you can call or email a claim in and then a report is generated and we call an iris. You are supposed to read these and you are supposed to figure out what the claimant needs and address it. And in our office, somebody reported to me, a couple months ago that we were not doing these at all and there were 32,000 pending. It is a concern because some are calling in and it can be an informal claim. If we tonight process the iris we dont know the claim for those people. Not everybody calls in for iris and asks the status of their claim. The follow, i know ms. Ruell testified to this but the staff at columbia and st. Pete did they violate guidance provided in the fast letter 1310 . I dont have an incident that it did. I dont know. Same here. I am not sure. I know they say the duplicate payments dont happen and what a problem this is. We say it is fixed and it is fixed but obviously it isnt. There is many ways that the va that you can receive a duplicate payment. Prior to certain year veterans stop receiving service numbers. A lot of the veterans are in the system with a service number. When that same veteran or one of their survivors submits a claims they put the veterans Social Security number on the correspondence. When we put a claim on an end product, we create a duplicate record for the veteran. So the person has the same number and one service and one claim number and that can cause the veteran to be paid twice. There are other ways it happens. There is an operating system and everybody is looked at by a personal Identification Number and that is how the benefits are paid based on this number. If you apply for benefits and we put your claim under control with just your name and you didnt provide your Social Security number because you submitted an informal claim and were not aware you had to we will put a claim under control with a mary smith and no Social Security number. When mary smith comes in and provides her Social Security number we put a claim under control with her Social Security number. Our Computer System has two different pid numbers for that mary smith and she can get two checks. I worked on claims where one claimant got five checks per month. The va will tell you the problem is corrected and they have data mining programs to find the duplicate payments. I would disagree. Usually every week i find some. I stopped reported them because for two years i collected and reported them and nothing changed. I really cared about it because if we have the wrong Social Security number for a claimant that affects other benefits through government matching programs. We had a case of someone trying to apply for food stamps and it looked like they were getting money from the va but they were not. The va has dup licate reports and they can be paid twice. Thank you. Mr. Bradley, you are recognized. Thank you mr. Chairman and thank you for being here with us this evening. Mr. Soto, i am just shocked to hear your story of being laid off on june 30th. We have had a lot of Committee Hearing over the sourcourse of last month and talked about the need for the va to improve and to become a good, positive organization and there is going to have to be real cultural change. We talked about the vha a lot. I wanted to ask you and the other panelist have you felt any sense of change coming down from the top around the Work Environment . How we want to improve, encourage, and serve the veterans and be a veterancentered operation. Have you felt that change in culture in your department . No. Mr. Robinson . I have a new director now. So i am not going to lump all of the directors in one pool because i dont like to paint with that kind of brush. She is new. We have been able to get along and together. Up until that point . Can you answer up until that point . Up until that point no. It was awful. Employees suffered. And the reason it disturbed me that the va chain of command knew and allowed it to be. Thank you, mr. Robinson. And ms. Ruell, have you felt any change recently . No. Actually i believe things are getting worse. I took it upon myself to help employees that were targeted by manageme management. They are terrified to stand up for themselves and they i dont want to be treated like that. I have a family to feed and i cannot afford to be fired. I promise them i would spend every moment i have and represent them against the agency if they need to file a claim. I feel like the agency let me down because they promised you can come into work and have a discriminationfree workplace and that is not the case. And i spent two years helping employees get their jobs back because the va isnt doing it. It is only getting worse. I get probably 45 calls a week begging for my help and honestly there is not a lawyer out there who will help you. At the early strange you would have to pay them 15 20,000 and most dont have that money. If something doesnt change soon i dont know if there is going to be any good workers left in the va. Thank you. I wanted to ask your reaction when the higher ups talk about notable progress and reducing the claims backlog . The Ranking Member mentioned the numbers in his opening comments of 630,000 plus down to 270,000. What is your reaction . Did you believe the progress was made ms. Ruell . No. Mr. Robinson . No, because we dont analyze the numbers we are counting. The va is saying or we say because this is my organization as well. We say the backlog is down 50 but if you look at the number it isnt down 50 . Numbers can be manipulated. When i see dependency claims over 200,000, okay . When i see appeals increase to over 297,000 these are veterans. Somebody would have to be asleep at the wheel to not realize they were going up. You can look at numbers anyway you cant to but for an example what i have seen during this time. I have seen failed initiatives such as contracting claims development and the idea that created the fast track for processing agent orange claims. I saw procedures doing that and all hands on deck to include suspending quality reviews, provisional ratings, unlimited overtime and 20 hours mandatory. I have seen Refresher Training and we shutdown offices and had 30 of the workforce coming back. That should have been accounted for. We had changes in performance standards twice. We have changed the money report twice, excluded the 930 from the rating bunding. We used ep 400s and changed that and abused that to request evidence. I think my time is up. So thank you and i yield back. Thank you, mr. Chairman. I would like to thank you for being here today and your compelling testimony. I agree with ms. Probrow and we have been told the backlog has been worked on and making progress and you are saying that is baloney and they are concerned about numbers and not veterans. And changing the date of a claim is common practice to reduce the ba backlog. It is unbelievable this is going on and no one is responsible for it. I am hoping we will make progress through the hearing and make it happen. I have a question for you. And maybe each of you. Name the top two things that you would change if you were in charge ms. Ruell to make things better. How do we change the culture here to make it better . I understand rules for bonuses is a big problem but tell me what you think if you were in charge. I think that if management does something wrong that they need to be held accountable. They have no problem holding an employee accountable. Many managers in my office have fired people over illegally. They should have to pay their legal fees should they be found to be guilty of an illegal firing. They use regional counsel as their own private attorneys and i am spending my own time representing employees because they cannot afford an attorney. So i feel like the biggest problem is accountability for the people in middle and upper manageme management. It has been my experience you can never find out the name of the person that implemented the problem. Mr. Robinson, what are your top things if you were in charge to make the culture better . Make the veteran the object of business. He comes first. And the employees need to be given effective tools, training, and leadership and we cannot do that without leadership. Mr. Soto . I agree we have to start with policies that place the veteran before the numbers and secondly we have to completely think about restructuring the Training Programs for raters and vsrs. It is time to change that. Let me ask another question. For the men and women returning home from the service who would you recommend to them in order to get their claim process . What should they do . Is there something that everyone should do to make the claim go better . You have any ideas on that . I think one of the main problems with the va expects is a completed application is different than what the regular person thinks. They have ruled that zero isnt an answer on the income validation. We have to ask you if you met zero. So there is really strange rules that we have to follow at the va. An average person who fills out an application wouldnt know. So going through a Congress Member or call thiing the media the only way to get them to your application faster. We have to educate the veterans and do outreach and explain the process because we get documents we dont need. The veterans goes to the doctor and he is claiming a knee condition and he goes to the doctor and he will send in the documents pertaining to everything and the knee. If we can simplify and get the veterans to file medical evidence that per tains to what they are claiming i think that would be a great health in educating the veteran in the process. I think that will make a lot of money doing that; educating veterans. I am out of time but i appreciate you being here today. Thanks. Ms. Kirkpatrick you are recognized. This culture of intimidation has to stop. I introduced hr 54 which is the whistle blower protection act because i want to make sure there is not retaliation against them. Thank you for being here and we would not have the information without your courage and commitment to the veterans and that is what it is about take caring care of the veterans. I would like to know for each of you when you started at the va were you given a policy that directs you how to file a claim if you see something you are not happy with . We are all told to review, lets put it that way, this thing called the no fear act. We are told not to have fear. It doesnt work. Mr. Robinson . I came to the va 18 years ago and it was a lot different then. I didnt get anything at that time. But we have to read the policy or whatever but that is about it. Ms. Ruell . Once a year we get the annual whistle blower no retaliation email. That is why i reported the duplicate emails. There is no grieving policy . We have a union but it took two and a half years to get the suspension off my record. The Decision Maker when you go through process were the people that punished me. So i realized i am not going to go through the grievance process because why would i want to a bias Decision Maker and i then tried the eeo avenue. Unfortunately that takes a year and a half to even possibly get a court date and sometimes it is up to three years. When you are being tormented at work every day that is not a solution. You can report to the office of special council but they accept 5 of the cases. I felt like there were laws out there to protect us and i was fooled by them and they have all let me down. It is kind of like if you say your husband or wife is abusing you and the police give you a piece of paper that says you need to stay away. That doesnt protect you from getting beat up from your spouse. I am from arizona and i am a former prosecutor and we have a difficult time getting people to report child abuse and neglect until we had an anonymous hotline. And would it be beneficial to have an anonymous hotline for patients and workers outside of the system that knows to somebody outside of that system to address and look into it. I would like to know your thoughts about that. I think it would be a good start but the people you need to report to have to be far removed from the people involved. If the same person is still in power im just going to get more people to help. I see your point. Mr. Ronald robinson. I agree 100 percent. If employees and our own organization cant expect it to protect them that is the problem. We have to protect our employees like i said to the acting secretary, he said he will do that. Now we will see whether he does it not. The will be watching to make sure we are doing what we say. Five seconds. I would like to see. Thank you. My time has expired. Thank you, mr. Chairman. You are recognized for five minutes. I just want to thank you all for your courage in coming forward. I think without the whistleblowers the employees at the va who really care about meeting our nations obligations to men and women who have served this country, without you all we would not have any idea really what the magnitude of the problems within the Veterans Affairs. One question. Let me say first that i think there is an emotional component to your stories and the way that you are treated once you are identified as a whistle blower within the organization. I think you have all expressed that. Ms. Kristen ruell, you gave some very specific examples about how tough it is to go into work every day when things like that happen to you. We talked about your car being damaged and the other things that occurred. One question that i have, the manner in which all of you were retaliated against, what are you members of the union . Will was the role of the union in terms of protecting the employees, your specific case, let me start with mr. Javier soto. What recourse did you have . I assume your remember. Yes. Okay. Essentially we are still trying to figure out what happened. What i believe is that retaliation for the whistleblowing we have problems with claim processing. There is no other way to address them. We found ourselves in that strange this situation where we have to rely on the union to help. That br