Ayotte Urges Support for Bipartisan Bill to Claw Back VA Bonuses

Press Release

Testifying before the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee this week, U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) urged her colleagues to support bipartisan legislation she introduced with Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) that would take back bonuses paid to VA employees who were involved in the manipulation of electronic waitlists. The House of Representatives passed a related bill earlier this year.

Because the VA used wait-time metrics as a factor in determining employee bonuses, some VA employees were incentivized to use secret waitlists to artificially inflate compliance data in order to maximize their bonus payments. According to one report, employees at the Phoenix VA hospital received approximately $10 million in bonuses since 2011, while simultaneously using secret waitlists to hide delays in patients receiving care. In addition, the VA paid out $278 million in bonuses in 2013, millions of which went to employees in facilities being investigated for wait list manipulations.

"It's outrageous that VA employees who deliberately manipulated waitlists received bonus pay at taxpayers' expense," said Ayotte at this week's hearing. "I urge you all to work with me and with Senator McCaskill to pass this legislation to make sure that individuals who perpetrated the wait list fraud are held fully accountable and that they pay back the bonuses they should never have received."

The Ayotte-McCaskill legislation directs the VA secretary to require employees who received bonuses in 2011 or later to repay those bonuses if they were involved in the deliberate manipulation of electronic wait lists. The employees' superiors are also required to pay back bonuses if they knew, or reasonably should have known, of their subordinates' purposeful omission of the names of veterans from electronic waitlists. The bill requires the VA secretary to identify these VA employees through reports issued by the department's Inspector General.

The Senate bill is being cosponsored by Senators Jerry Moran (R-KS), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Amy Klobuchar (R-MN), John Thune (R-SD), Mike Crapo (R-ID), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). Ayotte and McCaskill introduced similar legislation last Congress.

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