Problems at the embattled U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs may soon get worse.
Veterans Affairs whistleblower Scott Davis, program specialist at the VA National Health Eligibility Center, issued an open letter to President Donald Trump claiming the VA is about to toss out upwards of 500,000 applications for healthcare benefits.
“I am sending this whistleblower disclosure to your office due to the urgent need for executive intervention,” Davis wrote, according to the Washington Examiner. “VA is planning on declaring over 500,000 Veteran applications for VA health care as incomplete and abandoned at the end of March 2017.”
According to the letter, the VA plans to abandon the applications for containing errors from the veterans themselves. Davis claims that isn’t true.
Davis says follow-up letters from the VA were sent to the wrong applicants. Applicants lacking financial records were asked to provide proof of military service and applicants lacking military service records were asked to provide financial documents. Since the information actually needed in both cases was never received, the VA plans to trash them for being “incomplete.”
Additionally, Davis claims the VA is “illegally” re-categorizing all pending applications as incomplete, effectively throwing out requests due to errors in the VA’s own enrollment system.
According to the Washington Examiner, the VA set a March 2017 deadline for correcting the forms, but the office still can’t confirm if the forms have actually been corrected.
Davis registered with the whistleblower program in 2014 and has since faced harassment and retaliation for reporting the deletion of veteran healthcare records and a backlog of 600,000 healthcare applications.
H/T Mic.com