Ayotte, McCaskill Reintroduce Legislation to Claw Back Bonuses to VA Employees Responsible for Misconduct

Press Release

Continuing their efforts to improve accountability at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) this week re-introduced bipartisan legislation 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 on Monday.

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.

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, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "They must be held fully accountable for their misconduct - starting with repaying the funds they wrongly received, which our bipartisan bill would require."

"That VA employees and supervisors who cooked the books and manipulated wait times were receiving bonuses based on that deception was the worst kind of bureaucratic failure," said McCaskill, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee. "I'm hopeful this legislation and other bipartisan measures we've taken to help combat systemic issues at the VA will put us on a path towards restoring trust there, and ensuring we're living up to the promises made to our veterans."

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.

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