However, on Tuesday, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest again, when Sloan Gibson, deputy VA secretary, defended two high-ranking VA officials accused by the IG of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars, by praising them for enduring their controversy. Sloan works directly for Obama appointee VA secretary Robert Alan McDonald. The VA, already engulfed in controversy, is yet to punish the pair in any way.
If the average veteran swindled $400,000 from the company he or she works for it’s not hard to imagine them getting fired and quite probably jailed for a considerable amount of time. But it doesn’t work that way in Obama’s administration, it almost never happens. In worst case scenarios, at the VA, people are moved around, often transferred to equally cushy jobs in a different city or possibly suffer minor demotions.
For his part, Gibson said Tuesday he did not believe it was right for Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves to go unpunished when charges against them were sustained.
“I do not believe it’s the intent of Congress, and I don’t believe it’s the right thing” to allow employees who commit wrongdoing to go unpunished, Gibson told reporters in a conference call. “I intend to take some punitive action” against Rubens and Graves. Critics say VA executives are rarely punished for anything and that such unethical leniency has contributed to the recent explosion of controversy over the care of veterans.
Rubens earns $181,497 as director of the Philadelphia regional office for the Veterans Benefits Administration, while Graves receives $173,949 as head of the St. Paul, Minnesota, benefits office.
After Rubens and Graves gamed the VA system, allegedly stealing $400,000 in government benefits, Sloan Gibson, deputy VA secretary, praised a judge’s recent decision that blocked their demotions. Close enough for government work, right? Instead of calling for justice, Sloan blamed the outrage over their lenient treatment on “considerable external pressure” by the media and Congress to punish personnel who may not have done anything wrong.
Congress did it? Graves and Rubens were singled out in a September 2015 inspector general report that alleges the two women created job openings for themselves in distant cities and gamed a VA program designed to pay for VA employees’ legitimate moving expenses. “Perhaps the greatest frustration for me is, the IG published a report which is not supported by the evidence,” Gibson said during a VA conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon. “We have taken two good people–they made an error in judgement,” he said, noting Graves and Rubens have seen their reputations “trashed.”
Even though critics were already questioning the lenient treatment of Graves and Rubens, two separate judges on the Merit Systems Protection Board each reversed the VA’s decision to demote Rubens and Graves for their role in manipulating the relocation program. However September’s IG report states that “Graves had pressured a colleague to leave his job so she could manipulate the VA’s employee relocation program and pocket nearly $130,000 in benefits. The same IG report found Rubens had created a less-demanding position for herself at the VA’s regional office in Philadelphia, then netted $274,000 in moving benefits to take the job while retaining her six-figure salary. Gibson argued what occurred did not amount to the theft of taxpayer dollars.
Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said the VA’s effort to issue “an even weaker slap on the wrist” to Rubens and Graves should be of “little comfort” to taxpayers.
“Had VA not been so determined to shield the employees who approved Rubens’ and Graves’ exorbitant relocation packages from accountability, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Miller said Tuesday. “The real issue VA should be focused on at this point is helping Congress reform the federal government’s dysfunctional civil service system, which is at the root of all the department’s most serious personnel problems.”
