Detroit Regional Office Concerning Shredder Scandal

[Magnum4x]

I use the Detroit office and I have researched and read everything I could about it. First let me say I had letters and forms involved there since June 2000 to present date 2012. I do not believe the thought that all these people just threw stuff away just to be mean, they did it on fear of losing their jobs. They were given a 1 week of amnesty to turn in all letters and forms they had stuffed in back of desk or hidden in a room. They did not want to get caught, and to show they had a good work performance they trashed the evidence anyways. They have a tremendous pressure from office mangers about case loads and bringing down the percentage of filed claims. So they did like a guy we caught at a shop I was working at who was taking any parts he scrapped or messed up and throwing them in a outside steel dumpster. This made them look good with their production and a 0 scrap rate. What the VA people did is still not forgivable, but it was done out of fear.

[broncovet]

What upset many Veterans was the VA's response. They blamed it on "untrained employees" rather than admit to a systemic flaw so that it could be fixed. The only thing that is "fixed" is that the VAOIG no longer does shredder bin inspections, so there wont be any more violations. This would be like eliminating unsafe drivers by eliminating the police force. Sure, there would not be any more violations, but that would not be because of any improvement, but just more lax enforcement.

Instead of discarding Veterans evidence in back room boxes or shredder bins, it is often placed in another Veterans file. Im not kidding..they use our C file as trash cans for other Veterans evidence that they dont want to look at.

We are not blaming employees. There is no way one or two employees could shred evidence in 41 out of 57 regional offices. This is clearly a management problem, not an employee problem. Bad employees could simply be fired, but bad management gets bonuses.

The VA has a black eye on this, and is desperately trying to make it go away. It really would only take seconds to scan in each document to create an electronic record of it. The VA does not scan in Vets evidence because they dont want to scan them in. It gives the VA an "opportunity to deny" still more Vets so that there is more money for million dollar parties for employees.