PurpleheartOklahoma (scroll down)

DVA make up and short articles

The Department of Veterans Affairs DVA and Vets Employment
The DVA is made up of 3 departments...
 
            1...Veterans Health Administration  (VA Hospitals and Clinics)
            2...Veterans Benefits Administration (Regional Offices for Benefits)
            3...Veterans Cemetery Administration  (all National Cemeteries)
 
Each of these operate separately and are not even in the same VISN or Regional jurisdiction...there is an Under Secreatry for Health, an Under Secretary for Benefits,and and Under Secretary for Cemetaries.  The Secretary of VA is Eric Shinseki and he is over all of the above..
 
So when you break down the Veterans employment the Secretary gets figures from each of the three listed above, averages them and that is what they report for total VA employment of Veterans....
 
       So if VHA has 10% and VBA has 10% and VCA has 90% you then end up with a total Veterans employment of about 36%...now the problem starts when the majority of the VA employees work in the VHA and the VBA...remember there are about 170 VA Hospitals and Clinics. about 65 Regional Offices and about 120 National Cemeteries...but the average Cemetery has only about 10 to 12 employees....or about 1500 of the 330,000 VA employees.  Of the 1500 then about 1350 are Veterans in the Cemetery system (90%)...so that leaves the rest of the 330,000 or about 328,500 and of these then 32,850 (10%) are Veterans and the other 295,650 are non veterans which consists of family and friends...bottom line is we have about 34,200 Veterans out of the 330,000 total VA employees....the VA wants you to believe that 110,000 of their employees are Veterans...people that is 1 in every 3..walk down any VA hospital, or Regional Office and show me 1 out of 3 are Veterans...you will be lucky to find 1 out of every 10.
 
If in reality the VHA had 30% and VBA had 30% and VCA had 90% then the total VA employment for Veterans would be at 50%...the numbers speak for themselves...
 
   I hope this helps you in understanding why we are so concerned about the lack of Veterans employment in the VA...
 
            Cris Ford
            PDC OK MOPH

Slightly different slant:
            VA is about 33% not 10 % but they do need to get up to about 70%   They also need to honor 109-461 which requires them to purchase first from SDVOSB's but they refuse to do so even though GAO agrees with a recent protest by a SDVOSB.  National should get on top of this.

            Don Nichols
            PDC OK MOPH and Past Nat'l MOPH vet's Jobs Coordinator