Tag: Veterans Affairs

If this woman was able to so easily fool the VA for years to receive benefit money it just makes me wonder how much more fraud is going on?:

A woman faked the birth of a son to collect the veterans benefits for 17 years, according to court documents.

The man who the woman claimed was the father of the child was killed in High Point in 2006.

Elizabeth Hayes Cox, 60, claimed she gave birth to the son of Randall Cox, who was a military veteran receiving Veterans Administration benefits, according to an indictment. Records show she claimed Randall Cox’s benefits should be paid to her for child support, and she fraudulently collected $103,000 in benefits from March 2000 through May of this year.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link, but you would think the VA would ask for something as simple as a birth certificate to prove her claim?

This is so stupid I don’t even know where to begin:

Local United States Department of Veterans Affairs staffers were left horrified after a coworker put up a “Make Killing Great Again” poster on his office door.

It all played out earlier this month at a VA office building on Clairmont road in DeKalb County.

After a source inside the agency sent Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Aaron Diamant a picture of that disturbing poster Thursday night, he spent this afternoon working to find out what the agency is doing to ease workers fears and hold the staffer who put it up accountable.

“I’m afraid. I’m truly afraid,” a VA staffer, who spotted the poster and asked not to be identified, told Diamant.

The long-time VA employee, who asked not to be identified, told Diamant she’s terrified every time she returns to work at the building that houses the Healthcare Eligibility Center.

The poster on a 3rd-floor office door contained an image of Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the words, “Make Killing Great Again.”

“I thought that he would come in there any day and at any time and start shooting the office up,” the employee said.  [WSB-TV Atlanta]

You can read more at the link, but this poster is clearly a parody of President Trump’s “Making America Great Again” tagline that anyone with a sense of humor would understand.  The fact the media is calling the poster “disturbing” and someone working at the VA is “truly afraid” of the poster I think says more about them then the person who put the poster up in their cubicle.

With that all said the work place should be a professional environment which the poster clearly does not contribute to.  When asked to take the poster down by the union the worker took the poster down.  Yet people going running to the media hoping to blow this up and want the guy investigated, for what?

There is plenty of things that can be improved with the VA disability system, but I do not think there will be much consensus to do so until the much larger SSI disability problems are addressed:

The room fell silent for seven minutes as Illinois Rep. Tammy Duckworth upbraided a government contractor.
“Shame on you,” the congresswoman scolded Braulio Castillo at an oversight hearing in Washington, D.C., last year, accusing the business owner of gaming the veterans disability system.
Castillo had filed a claim with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs after learning that a disability rating would give his technology company preferential standing for federal contracts.
His disability: A foot injury suffered playing football at the U.S. Military Preparatory Academy in 1984.
Though the injury didn’t prevent him from going on to play quarterback at the University of San Diego, the VA rated him 30% disabled — good for $450 a month, tax-free.
Duckworth, an Army veteran who lost both legs in Iraq in 2004 when her helicopter was shot down, noted that her severely damaged right arm was rated only 20%.
“You, who never picked up a weapon in defense of this great nation, very cynically took advantage of the system,” she said. “You broke the faith with this nation.”
Duckworth directed her ire at Castillo, but the real culprit was the broad eligibility criteria of the disability system itself. The contractor had played by the rules for benefits and, as many Washington lawmakers know, those benefits cover ailments from sports injuries to bullet wounds, resulting in disability payouts that totaled $58 billion this fiscal year — up from $49 billion last year.
Routinely criticized in government reviews as out of touch with modern concepts of disability, the system has strayed far from its official purpose of compensating veterans for their lost earning capacity.( LA Times)

You can read more at the link.