Veterans Affairs' watchdog's investigation contradicted
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.