Senators Push Bill to Limit Number of VA Senior Execs Receiving Bonuses

Republican senators have introduced companion legislation to a House bill that would limit the number of senior executives at the Veterans Affairs Department who are eligible for bonuses and reform the performance review process.

The 2015 Increasing VA Accountability to Veterans Act would allow no more than 30 percent of the department’s senior executives to receive top performance ratings and qualify for bonuses. In addition, the bill directs the VA secretary to reassign once every five years, “each individual employed in a senior executive position to a position at a different location that does not include the supervision of the same personnel or programs.” The secretary could waive that requirement on an individual basis but would have to justify it to Congress.

“Despite the passage of the Choice Act last year, the VA is still not doing enough to hold those responsible accountable for their corrupt behavior when treating our nation’s veterans,” said Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, the bill’s sponsor.

The Merit Systems Protection Board recently upheld the November 2014 firing of Sharon Helman, the former career senior executive who ran VA’s Phoenix health care system when the scandal over falsifying wait lists erupted last spring. Chief Administrative Judge Stephen C. Mish in December upheld Helman’s firing because she improperly accepted more than $13,000 in gifts from a lobbyist and failed to report them, not because she engaged in misconduct related to manipulating data to conceal excessive wait times for vets seeking health care.

Helman was on paid administrative leave for about six months before she was fired. The Senate bill, like its House counterpart, would reduce to 14 days the amount of paid administrative leave for top department officials under investigation, unless the secretary can show good reason for extending that leave.

“To fix the VA and make sure it achieves its mission of providing high quality and timely health care to our veterans, we must eliminate the culture of incompetence, negligence and underperformance that has been tolerated and, in some cases, even covered up for too long,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a co-sponsor of the legislation. Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and John McCain of Arizona are also co-sponsors of S. 290.  

The legislation would give the secretary the power to strip pension benefits from VA senior executives who are convicted of a crime that influenced their job performance and fired. It would prevent senior executives about to be fired because they were convicted of a felony, but who instead retire, from receiving their full retirement benefits. The secretary would be allowed to take away the government contribution portion of the pension for the time period in which the employee was engaged in behavior warranting removal. The rest would be returned to the employee in a lump sum.

Both VA Secretary Bob McDonald and Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson have argued that the department currently does not have the authority to deprive a senior executive of her property, including earned retirement benefits, unless that employee is convicted of treason or terrorism.  

While the pension and administrative leave measures would be significant changes from current law, they would not likely affect as many senior executives as the provisions related to bonuses and job reassignments. There were 346 career SES members at VA in fiscal 2013, and 63.3 percent of them received a performance award for that period, according to the latest data from the Office of Personnel Management.

Earlier this week, Jenny Mattingley, legislative director for the Senior Executives Association, said the group welcomed a conversation about reforming the SES performance evaluation system, though she questioned whether SEA and lawmakers would agree on what that reform looks like. “If this is a start to a conversation rather than an end, then maybe we can find some reforms that really make sense,” she said.

But she also expressed concern over “arbitrary” quotas capping the number of senior executives who can receive bonuses and reassigning employees once every five years. “If the secretary is reassigning people, does that become really political?” she asked. Mattingley said many top jobs in VA are specialized, particularly those within the Veterans Health Administration, and so it wouldn’t be practical to reassign a senior executive in the general counsel’s office to a job running a VA hospital, for example. Mattingley said the SEA has always supported accountability, but worries that the public discussion about mismanagement at VA revolves around “this idea that all these senior executives are doing something terrible,” which isn’t accurate. “If someone is doing something wrong they should absolutely be held accountable,” she said. “We are not saying ‘no.’ We are saying, ‘Make it fair, and make sure you are getting the right people.’ ”

Under the bill, the VA secretary would have to submit an annual report to Congress on the department’s performance review system for senior executives, including documentation on each senior executive’s evaluation and bonus recommendations.