{"id":1737,"date":"2018-03-01T15:43:20","date_gmt":"2018-03-01T15:43:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/?p=1737"},"modified":"2018-03-01T15:43:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-01T15:43:20","slug":"report-claims-va-secretary-david-shulkin-to-have-misused-federal-funds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/report-claims-va-secretary-david-shulkin-to-have-misused-federal-funds\/","title":{"rendered":"Report Claims VA Secretary David Shulkin To Have Misused Federal Funds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new report has placed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/president-trump-to-provide-better-mental-healthcare-to-us-veterans\/\">U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs<\/a> Secretary David Shulkin, MD under heavy fire for misusing government funds to cover his wife\u2019s airfare for a European trip and wrongly accepting tickets to Wimbledon. The report revealed that the 11-day trip cost a staggering $122,000<!--more--> in taxpayer dollars. The amount was also misrepresented to ethics lawyers when VA Secretary returned to the U.S.<br \/>\nIt was further reported that Shulkin\u2019s Chief of Staff Viveca Wright Simpson actually administered an official email to procure taxpayer funding for Shulkin\u2019s wife\u2019s airfare that cost more than $4,000. The report said that in doing so, Shulkin may have violated federal criminal statutes.<br \/>\nThe OIG has further referred this to the Department of Justice and has asked them to consider it for criminal prosecution. Interestingly, DOJ has declined to prosecute.<br \/>\nThe OIG further revealed that Shulkin had also misrepresented the methodology of obtaining the Wimbledon tournament tickets when he was discussing the issue with ethics officials.<br \/>\nIt was also reported that three other top-level VA officials and a six-member security team accompanied Shulkin in Europe for a VA conference in London. He also had further plans of visiting other places as well.<br \/>\nShulkin condemned these findings in a letter that stated, \u201cYour staff\u2019s conduct related to this investigation reeks of an agenda. Your portrayal of this trip is overall and entirely inaccurate\u2026 [and] forms an inappropriate judgment regarding what my family chooses to do with our free time on a Saturday afternoon.\u201d<br \/>\n\u201cMy wife and I did what millions of people do every day. We went to a sporting event, on our personal time, with a friend. The entire report seeks to question and undermine the validity of the trip and its importance to furthering the work of the VA,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new report has placed U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, MD under heavy fire for misusing government funds to cover his wife\u2019s airfare for a European trip and wrongly accepting tickets to Wimbledon. The report revealed that the 11-day trip cost a staggering $122,000<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1738,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[226,227,230,392],"class_list":["post-1737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healthcare-news","tag-healthcare","tag-healthcare-it","tag-healthcare-news","tag-veterans-affairs"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emrsystems.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}