Can You Top This One? ... The V.A. "Outperformers" are Plentiful Indeed ... We the People and our Nation's Vets Take it on the Chin Again

Fantasy Island is real, and the V.A. headquarters serves as home base. Only in Washington can this stuff happen.


But let's cut to the chase.


Some stories speak for themselves. Here's one.


Every Senior V.A. Executive Was Rated "Fully Successful" or Better Over 4 Years says the following:


"All of the 470 senior executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs received annual ratings over the last four years indicating that they were “fully successful” in their jobs or even better, according to data released at a congressional hearing on Friday, despite delays in processing disability compensation claims and problems with veterans’ access to the department’s sprawling health care system.

None of the department’s senior executives received either of the two lowest of five possible job ratings, “minimally satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” in any of the past four fiscal years.

The data also showed that in 2013, nearly 80 percent of the senior executives were rated either “outstanding” or as having exceeded “fully successful” in their job performance, and that at least 65 percent of the executives received performance awards, which averaged around $9,000. Only about 20 percent received the middle of the five ratings.

Veterans Affairs officials sought to play down the data, saying that only 15 senior executives across the entire federal government had received either of the two lowest ratings in the most recent year — suggesting that the high ratings enjoyed by V.A. officials were not out of line with those of their counterparts at other government agencies.

But the data, which were a focus of a House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing, angered lawmakers who said they provided further evidence that the highest reaches of the department were out of touch with problems in the system and that there was a lack of accountability for poor management.

“Do you think that’s normal in business, that nearly every executive is successful?” Representative Phil Roe, Republican of Tennessee, asked Gina S. Farrisee, the department’s assistant secretary for human resources and administration. “That means you put the bar down here, so anybody can step over it.”

Representative Ann McLane Kuster, Democrat of New Hampshire, likened the numbers to grade inflation and said they reminded her of Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, where “all of the children are above average.”

In all, the department paid performance awards to senior executives that totaled $4.7 million in 2010 and $2.7 million in the most recent fiscal year.

The bonus system was originally intended to reward high performers and to help the department retain its best employees, and it is widely viewed as having helped professionalize the V.A. in the 1990s. As reports of problems accumulated this year, the department suspended the awards for senior health care executives.

In her written testimony, Ms. Farrisee said the department needed to do better in holding executives accountable, but defended the awards generally. “Our ability to allocate performance awards to our highest performers is vital to hiring and retention,” she said.

But the system has come under harsh scrutiny in recent years, most recently in connection with revelations that employees had used a variety of machinations to cloak the long wait times many veterans faced to see physicians.

Many administrators’ bonuses were tied partly to whether their facilities met patient wait-time goals, including being able to see a doctor within 14 days. When a shortage of doctors and other factors made it impossible for many facilities to come anywhere close to those standards, many administrators and patient schedulers manipulated data and used other tactics to make the numbers look better than they were."

Summing Up

But it's not just V.A. executives who benefit from "grade inflation" or just plain cheating by manipulating the data in government offices.

As described hereinabove, they were just doing what everybody else does in government as only 15 senior officials throughout government received unsatisfactory performance ratings in the most recent year.

Only in Washington can such crap not be surprising, and I'm not surprised. Are you?

We the People keep getting ignored and even screwed by our government's elitists.

So do many of our nation's wonderful and patriotic veterans.

That's my take.

Thanks. Bob.