The Department of Veterans Affairs Inspector General on Monday denied hiding a 2008 report that identified improper manipulations of patient wait times at the Phoenix VA hospital where up to 40 veterans died while awaiting care.
In a statement released Monday, acting Veterans Affairs Inspector General Richard Griffin said that "suggestions from the media and some members of Congress that the OIG kept secret inappropriate scheduling practices are belied by nearly a decade of reporting."
"We encourage serious readers to consider the persistent alarms the OIG has raised on patient wait times and scheduling practices—alarms acknowledged on numerous occasions by Congress at oversight hearings," Griffin said.
The Washington Examiner’s Mark Flatten reported last week that a 2008 VA Inspector General report found employees at the Phoenix VA hospital were deliberately falsifying patient wait times to game the system.
"We found that it was an accepted past practice at the medical center to alter appointments to avoid wait times greater than 30 days and that some employees still continue this practice," the 2008 report read.
However, that report was never released to the public.
Flatten also reported earlier this month that, for more than a decade, the VA IG missed signs of a systemic falsification of patient wait times, buried its findings deep in reports, and only recommended better monitoring by managers and training for employees.
In Monday’s statement, Griffin said the VA IG believed its recommendations to the Phoenix VA hospital were sufficient to fix the problems.
"In regard to the September 2008 memorandum, our investigation concluded that altering appointments was an accepted past practice to avoid wait times greater than 30 days, and that through a failure to properly communicate a requirement to adhere to policy, some employees continued this practice without management’s awareness," Griffin said.
Griffin continued, "Several supervisors and schedulers reported the practice had stopped, but at different times, and both management and staff were confused as to the proper way to schedule appointments. At the time, we believed that a warning in the form of a memorandum of administrative investigation was sufficient to advise the Phoenix HCS director of the problem so the director could take corrective action."
Additionally, Griffin said that such reports on administrative investigations often contain information protected by the Privacy Act and are only provided by request to members of Congress and Freedom of Information Act requesters.
Griffin said Congress first requested the report this month.
House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman Jeff Miller (R., Fla.) expressed skepticism about Griffin’s account. "Make no mistake. The department’s data manipulation scandal was caused by selfish VA bureaucrats who lied in order to hide interminable waits for medical care," Miller said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.
"But in reviewing the OIG’s numerous reports on VA wait time issues prior to April 2014, it does appear that the IG missed the forest for the trees, often labeling what we now know to be systemic and willful manipulation of medical care appointment data as basic procedural problems and breakdowns in training," Miller said.
"What’s worse, the OIG actually identified many of the Phoenix VA Healthcare System’s wait time issues in a 2008 report that it refused to make public, effectively keeping the problems hidden," Miller continued. "Given VA’s history of misleading statements regarding a range of issues, the IG must treat the department with much more scrutiny in the future."