The News & Observer: California lawmakers battling to access VA records to help resolve complaints

California lawmakers, distressed by the number of veterans experiencing difficulties accessing benefits, want to use their congressional allowance to pay to train members of their staffs to access veterans’ records.

More veterans live in California than in any other state. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs statistics show that 1.85 million veterans live in California. And most of them – roughly 1.38 million of them – are wartime veterans.

Those veterans call or show up at congressional district offices whenever they feel the department has failed them. That’s why lawmakers say they want their staffs to have read-only access to records to determine if there are errors or missing information preventing veterans from receiving housing and health benefits.

Cosponsoring the legislation that would make that access possible are Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, Rep. Mark De Saulnier, D-Concord, Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, Edward Royce, R-Fullerton, and Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena.

“We’ve had veterans who were misclassified; veterans who had their request for classification or disability put on hold, get lost or buried in the bureaucracy,” Thompson said.

He cited the case of a homeless veteran who had been unable to gain benefits that would help him find a place to live and medical care. “He was misclassified, so he couldn’t get health care and he couldn’t get any help getting into housing and, as a result, we got him into [U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs] healthcare and into an apartment where he’s living,” Thompson said.

Florida Rep. Ted Yoho, a Republican, crafted the legislation, known as the WINGMAN Act, following a failed effort to convince Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald that lawmakers needed additional oversight of veterans’ records.

The legislation would allow staff to have read-only access to the status of a pending claim, medical records, comp-and-pen records, rating decisions of a case and supplementary statement of the case as well as notices of disagreement, he said.

Yoho began publicly prodding McDonald to allow lawmakers to have read-only access to the records of their veteran constituents in April 2015. McDonald initially seemed to warm to the idea, but by early 2016 it was clear that his support was wavering and Congress would have to take legislative action, Yoho said.

“When I first met Secretary McDonald, he said: ‘Well, that’s kind of a no brainer,’ ” Yoho said. “He goes: ‘I don’t know why we wouldn’t do that.’ And then we were starting to get a little bit of blowback and we were finding out that it was privacy issues, you know, looking over the shoulder of the service workers in the regional service centers. And we’re not looking over anybody’s shoulder other than, ‘I want to find out the status of Veteran A’s claim.’ ”

Only a small number of the California congressional delegation initially expressed interest in Yoho’s early 2015 crusade. They cosigned two letters, dated April 20, 2015, and Aug. 11, 2015. McDonald encouraged the collaborative effort, but said in his response letters that the issue was complicated because it crossed “many areas of concern,” including privacy, legal, regulatory and system limitations.

By early 2016, lawmakers from several states decided to support Yoho’s efforts. Costa, DeSaulnier, LaMalfa, Thompson signed a February letter to McDonald. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, and Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, also signed the letter.

About 27,000 veterans reside in Costa’s district, according to staff data. DeSaulnier has 5,115 veterans in his district; LaMalfa, about 59,000; and Thompson, roughly 45,000, according to data from their offices. Lowenthal has about 8,375 veterans in his district, and Issa has more than 46,800 veteran constituents, the data indicate.

Collectively, the California legislators continued to press McDonald on why the department was preventing them from playing a more significant role in helping their constituents.

“In our combined experience, by the time a constituent advocate begins working on a veteran’s case, they are the only staff working the issue because all other avenues have been exhausted,” the letter said. “Given that our staffs are typically contacted in many cases as a last resort – after having first sought help from the [U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs] or a service officer – to help veterans navigate significant issues they are facing at the [department], we request further information clarifying why congressional offices continue to be denied access.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs does not have the legal authority to provide congressional staff members with unrestricted access to its electronic benefits processing system, Veterans Affairs Benefits Chief Allison Hickey said in a letter to Congress dated Oct. 6, 2015. Also, the records plan would likely cause “substantial administrative burdens” on the department and “instances in which the representatives would not be notified of developments and deadlines in the Veterans’ cases,” she said.

Hickey resigned 10 days later, but a VA spokesman used essentially her same words to respond to a recent request for comment.

Lawmakers say that veterans in their late 60s, 70s, or 80s often have health and disability issues that need to be addressed quickly and cannot have those needs postponed due to a cumbersome government system. Unfortunately, some veterans face monthlong waits for answers that sometimes come too late, Costa said.

“Some of these poor individuals have passed away by the time we’re able to address their issue in the way that we would have liked to in the beginning,” he said.

If the WINGMAN Act gains enough congressional support and the approval of President Barack Obama, then each lawmaker could have a certified staff member with read-only access to veterans’ records sometime in 2017, according to Yoho spokesman Brian Kaveney. It would cost a few thousand dollars to train a staffer to work with those records, Yoho said. Lawmakers who choose to spend their congressional allowances on that training would be reimbursed for those funds, according to the Members’ Handbook, which spells out how members of Congress can spend their office funds.