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The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C.(Photo: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)
WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs' inspector general may have wrongly claimed in a report last year that one of the top procurement officials at the VA steered contracts worth millions of dollars to friends, according to the inspector general at the Treasury Department.
Eric Thorson, the Treasury inspector general, also implied in a letter Thursday to Rep. Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican who chairs the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, that the claims in the report issued by the office of acting VA Inspector General Richard Griffin were influenced by a dispute between a VA employee and the procurement executive, who now works at Treasury.
Thorson's move exposes an unusual intermural spat between inspectors general, the independent watchdogs at about 75 federal agencies who root out mismanagement and abuse in their agencies, not in their counterparts' offices.
But it also adds to already mounting criticism of Griffin, who issued a widely criticized report on patient wait times at the Phoenix VA last year and has been skewered in recent weeks for failing to publicly release reports on other investigations, including a probe of opiate prescribing in Tomah, Wis.
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Griffin's spokeswoman, Catherine Gromek, said Friday neither Thorson nor Miller informed his office about the contradictory findings and she dismissed them out of hand.
"We absolutely stand behind the findings in the VA OIG report in question," she said.
Griffin's office issued a report in December that concluded Iris Cooper, who was executive director of the VA's office of acquisition operations, steered $15 million of work to Tridec Technologies, a company near Dayton, Ohio, owned by friends, to create acquisition software.
Based on e-mail correspondence, interviews and other documents, the VA inspector also concluded Cooper allowed the ultimate cost of the work to be broken down into successive awards under the $5 million threshold that would have required competitive bidding.
Thorson's letter said his office's review of the case and interviews with witnesses found Cooper did not award the contracts and did not unduly influence those who did. And he said the evidence does not show she allowed the work to be broken into pieces to avoid bidding.
"Those witnesses have provided consistent testimony that negates the review's conclusions and calls into question the integrity of the VA OIG's actions in this particular matter," Thorson wrote.
In addition, Thorson suggested the VA inspector may have improperly maligned Cooper, who is now one of the top procurement executives at Treasury, to settle an internal personnel score on behalf of another VA employee who controls funding for several staff positions in the VA inspector general's office.
He said witnesses reported one of Cooper's colleagues at the VA, Jan Frye, deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and logistics, boasted special influence over the inspector general and was seeking retribution after Cooper testified during a personnel hearing that he had created a hostile work environment.
"Witnesses A, B, D, and E specifically stated that Mr. Frye claimed to have special influence with the Counselor to the VA IG, Maureen Regan, the author of the Review at issue here," Thorson wrote.
Richard Griffin testifies on Capitol Hill on Sept. 9, 2014, before the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke, AP)
Gromek, the VA inspector's spokeswoman, said Frye does not have special influence over Regan and played no role in initiating the probe of Cooper.
The Treasury inspector asked the VA inspector general for documentation supporting its conclusions but was rebuffed based on privacy concerns, he said, and so Thorson said his office conducted its own investigation.
Miller said Friday he finds Thorson's findings "disturbing" and said they deserve further investigation. He lambasted Griffin and said it's time for President Obama to nominate a new VA inspector general.
"Whether it's VA OIG's penchant for hiding damaging reports from Congress and the public, the office's failure to cooperate with Congress and its fellow inspectors general, or OIG's repeated failures to accurately diagnose VA's wait time problems, VA OIG has been in need of a change in direction for quite some time," he said. "This incident should serve as a wake-up call to President Obama that it's well past time to appoint a permanent VA inspector general who is willing to be open, honest and follow the truth wherever it takes them."
Griffin came under heavy fire from Congress last fall after his office issued a report on falsified patient wait times in Phoenix that did not conclude they contributed to veteran deaths. He later conceded under questioning at a congressional hearing that they had.
He drew additional criticism from Capitol Hill last week after USA TODAY reported his office has declined to publicly release the findings of 140 health care investigations since 2006.
Among those was the report about "unusually high" opiate prescription rates at the VA medical center in Tomah that raised "serious concerns." A 35-year-old veteran died from an overdose as an inpatient in Tomah five months after the inspector completed but declined to release the report. He died from "mixed drug toxicity" just days after doctors agreed to add another opiate to the 14 drugs he was already prescribed.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, also recently blasted the VA inspector general and singled out Regan, his chief counsel, for withholding information about the Wisconsin investigation from his committee.
Griffin spokeswoman Gromek has said privacy laws and other mandates barred her office from turning over to Johnson the investigative file. And she said the inspector did not release the report on Tomah last year because — although it outlined serious concerns — it contained unsubstantiated allegations that could have been damaging to the opiate prescribers' reputations.
Regan, the VA inspector general's chief counsel, is to appear before Miller's committee at a hearing Monday night.
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