Profanity-laced letter from VA's Montgomery Regional Office tells widow that VA employees deliberately removed medical records from her late husband's file. Now, VAOIG is investigating widow.

by Larry Scott, VA Watchdog dot Org

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In October of last year, VA Watchdog dot Org broke the story about employees of the Veterans' Benefits Administration (VBA) shredding documents vital to veterans' benefits claims.  You can find all info on our VA'S SHREDDED & MISHANDLED DOCUMENTS PAGE.

Veterans were outraged.  VAOIG was investigating.  Congress got outraged.  Hearings were held.  New shredder policies were instituted at the VBA's 57 Regional Offices where claims are processed.

But, after all that, I still asked the question: 

What's to prevent VBA employees from "losing" vital documents by hiding, misfiling or removing them from the premises?

Evidently there are no such safeguards, because early this year I began getting emails from a VBA employee at the Regional Office in Montgomery, AL.

The first blurb about this appeared in April on our Under the Radar page.

As I began to get more emails from the VBA employee, I decided to write:

UNDER THE RADAR: MORE MISHANDLED VA DOCUMENTS -- VA whistleblower says he found ten boxes of old mail and a widow's claim from September of 2007.

That article is here ...
http://www.vawatchdog.org/09/nf09/
nfmay09/nf050609-1.htm

The fact that this was happening at the Montgomery Regional Office was not mentioned.

Then, in July, I received an internal email that showed the Montgomery Office to be in complete disarray.  I decided it was time to out Montgomery and wrote:

SHAKE-UP AT VA'S MONTGOMERY REGIONAL OFFICE -- Internal email from manager begs staff to get to work and states, "We are NOT providing quality service ..."

That article is here ...
http://www.vawatchdog.org/09/nf09/n
fjul09/nf071509-4.htm

One would think this situation couldn't get any worse.

One would be incorrect.

Barbara Hollingsworth, writing in the Washington Examiner, has uncovered shenanigans at the Montgomery Office that will make your head explode.  A letter, apparently from a VBA employee, telling a widow that other employees have hidden files necessary to her late husband's claim ... and, then, it appears VAOIG is investigating the widow!

How bad is all of this?  An attorney who practices veterans' law, after reading the articles, wrote:

"...it seems to me that the conspiracy here is to deny this woman her benefits and her due process rights and unlawfully use their official positions to intimidate her. If so the government persons involved could be personally liable."

We have three articles, all published on Wednesday, September 15, 2009.  There is the original article and two updates.

Thanks for the great work, Barbara.

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Barbara Hollingsworth: Instead of a check, VA sends widow a profanity-laced screed

By: Barbara Hollingsworth

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Instead
-of-a-check_-VA-sends-widow-a-profanity-laced-scre
ed-8243628-59266597.html

Following my Aug. 25 column ("Does government-run health care work? Ask vets"), I got a call from Bessie Krone, the widow of a World War II Navy veteran. She faxed me a copy of a shocking letter she said she recently received from the Department of Veterans Affairs' regional office in Montgomery, Ala.

The profanity-laced screed, date-stamped Sept. 3, 2009, and stapled to Form 4107 ("Your Rights to Appeal Our Decision"), brazenly admits that VA employees deliberately removed medical records from her late husband Robert's file.

"Mrs. Krone, are you that f...ing stupid?" asked the letter, supposedly signed by triage assistant coach Mark Carter, who acknowledged that the VA owed her late husband eight years of back pay in addition to a special monthly disability allowance he never got: "I still do not know why the previous team did not give that to him in September 1997. It was an oversight (maybe) but not likely. ... Your husband's application that he placed back in 1987 and his doctor's statement is still safely tucked away until you give up. Then it will be placed back into the file."

The letter also stated that Carter's boss, service center manager Amy Hill, repeatedly lied when she promised to approve Krone's overdue benefits if she dropped her complaint with the VA's Office of Inspector General: "You have personally spoken to Amy several times now, and both times she b-slapped you while looking straight into your eyes. She told you that if you would trust her and not ask for a OIG investigation, that she would grant your claim. What a truckload of s... that was.

"As you know an appeal would take years to achieve, only to be denied again," the letter continued. Hill "wanted you to trust her because [regional office director Ricardo] Randall told her to make you go away and to clean up her s... Randall and Amy both know what a s... load of trouble they are in and you Mrs. Krone are once again the toilet paper."

The letter added that Carter was told to "give the impression that you do not have a claim, no matter what you do or how you may respond."

When Krone personally asked Hill three times if she was aware of the shocking content of the letter, Hill allegedly said she was. I called Hill myself Friday, but she quickly said, "I can't comment," before referring me to the VA's public information office, which said that the matter was under investigation by the OIG. On Monday, Krone called again to say that her entire $35,000-plus claim had been deleted from the system.

Whom to believe? A woman with crippling arthritis who spent a year demonstrating in front of the Montgomery regional office demanding benefits the VA still owes her and thousands of other military families?

Or a government agency that, the U.S. Court of Appeals noted in a landmark Aug. 12 ruling, illegally altered disabled Vietnam veteran Philip E. Cushman's medical records to avoid paying his decades-old $100,000 claim?

That's a no-brainer.

Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner's local opinion editor.

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UPDATE: VA can’t keep track of veterans’ claims, but throws a great office party

By: Barbara Hollingsworth

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/SharpSt
icks/UPDATE--VA-cant-keep-track-of-veterans-claim
s-but-throws-a-great-office-party-59337462.html

I’ve already gotten feedback from my column today on the Department of Veterans Affairs (“Instead of a check, VA sends widow a profanity-laced screed”). Turns out that Larry Scott at VA Watchdog.org has been reporting on serious problems at the same Montgomery, Alabama regional office since May, after a whistleblower there reported:

“The mail keeps backing up so bad .. there is right this moment a stack of 3000 writeouts (2009) stacking up in Triage. They have been sitting in a unused desk for months. We have 500 pieces of returned mail and a box (6000 pieces) of returned mail-COLA. It has been collecting for months in a box under a table.

“Why do we keep making the same mistakes - because the supervisors / management do not pride themselves on their work / responsibilities or the VA organization. Now, if you ask them to put a table of food together, well then, smiles and dedicated caterers emerge. Character!”

Here's the link:
www.vawatchdog.org/09/nf09/nfjul09/nf071509-4.htm

Scott’s website broke the story about VA employees who were caught deliberately shredding veterans’ claims in Detroit. The Montgomery regional office is, he says, “not the worst RO, just one of the worst.”

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UPDATE: “Instead of a check, VA sends widow profanity-laced screed,”

By: Barbara Hollingsworth

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/SharpSti
cks/UPDATE-Instead-of-a-check-VA-sends-widow-profa
nity-laced-screed-Sept-15-59374497.html

Make a complaint about government employees, and you – not them –could end up as the target of a criminal probe.

That’s exactly what happened to Bessie Krone, a 62-year-old disabled widow from Montgomery, Alabama who recently received a expletive-filled letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Instead of finding out who sent her the vile letter and why, the VA’s Office of Inspector General, Division of Criminal Investigations is apparently investigating her!

Krone told me that Special Agents Humes and Hudson from Atlanta interrogated her for nearly an hour and a half at a nearby Arby’s restaurant. “A hamburger does not get as much grilling as I got today,” she told me. “They knew everything about me – how many brothers and sisters I had, when I was born, where my son lives, the number of grandkids I have, my cell phone number, when I went to the store this morning, even the exact time I called The Examiner.”

“So I told them: ‘You’ve investigated me real good. Now go investigate whoever sent that letter and leave me alone.’”

The agents kept pressing her again and again for the name of her alleged accomplice, Krone told me, but she didn’t budge. “They told me that I knew somebody in the VA who was feeding me this information and I needed to tell them who it is. If I didn’t cooperate, I could be charged with being an accessory to conspiracy. I kept telling them, ‘I do not know anybody in that VA office.’”

“They said I had a ‘friend,’ a VA employee who was trying to help me get my claim settled. I said, ‘You just showed me a letter showing that my claim was denied,’” she added.

Krone said she did tell the agents that the only person at the VA to whom she had given her new post office box was service manager Amy Hill, who refused to discuss the letter when contacted by The Examiner.

“Why did you go to the newspaper with this?” Krone said one of the agents asked her.

“My past experience with the VA, sir,” she replied.

“The VA has begun my punishment already,” Krone told me. When she called the VA’s 800 number to get an update, she was told that her claim number had been ordered removed by the same regional office she complained about.” Without a claim number, she won’t get her modest widow’s pension on Oct. 1.

“I will be a 62-year-old disabled homeless person next month,” Krone told me. “My small Social Security check will not be enough to live on and I will have to live in my car or go back to living in a rental shed like I did after my husband (a WWII Navy veteran) died.”

This is how our government treats the widows of men who fought and died for this country. As the daughter of a WWII Army vet myself, I am sickened and appalled.

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TOPICS: veterans, veterans' benefits, VA, Department of Veterans' Affairs, shredded documents, mishandled documents, Montgomery Region Office, Amy Hill