Posted By Richard Fernandez
The first thing a database developer learns to fear is data corruption [1]. “Data corruption refers to errors in computer data that occur during writing, reading, storage, transmission, or processing, which introduce unintended changes to the original data.” If left unchecked, data corruption eventually renders a database completely useless; not only useless, but harmful.
A useless database only fails to give you answers. A harmful database actually gives you consistently wrong answers. This was exactly what happened to the Veteran’s Affairs, according to the Washington Post [2].
About two years ago, Brian Turner took a job as a scheduling clerk at a Veterans Affairs health clinic in Austin. A few weeks later, he said, a supervisor came by to instruct him how to cook the books….
This is how it worked: A patient asked for an appointment on a specific day. Turner found the next available time slot. But, often, it was many days later than the patient had wanted.
Would that later date work? If the patient said yes, Turner canceled the whole process and started over. This time, he typed in that the patient had wanted that later date all along. So now, the official wait time was . . . a perfect zero days….
But all this was apparently a secret to Secretary Eric K. Shinseki, perched 12 levels above Turner in the VA’s towering bureaucracy. Somewhere underneath Shinseki — among the undersecretaries and deputy undersecretaries and bosses and sub-bosses — the fact that clerks were cheating the system was lost.
The Post’s David Farenthold says VA corruption began with the Republican Warren Harding, who nominated his poker buddy, Charles Forbes, to head the agency in 1921. Forbes, however, was a scoundrel. Harding, on being tainted by the scandal, apparently took things into his own hands, if one may pardon the pun, in the most politically incorrect of ways.
Eventually, Forbes was caught. The president was unhappy. In 1923, a White House visitor opened the wrong door and found Harding choking Forbes with his bare hands.
“You yellow rat! You double-crossing bastard!” Harding was saying, according to historians. When he noticed the visitor, he let go of Forbes’s neck.
But the damage, Farenthold seems to imply, had been done. A “culture of corruption” had taken root in the VA and it lingered like a miasma in the corridors – the Washington Post story goes on to say — until the reformer Bill Clinton arrived to clean house. He would banish the culture of corruption by instituting The System. Clinton appointed Kenneth Kizer to exorcise it with computers, performance measurements and regulation.
Seventy years after Forbes was gone, the place was still wrapped in that red tape.
That was clear on the day that Kenneth Kizer — a reformer appointed by President Bill Clinton — arrived at the VA’s health service.
“I had to approve reimbursement of a secretary . . . purchasing a cable for her computer. I think it was something like $11 or $12,” Kizer said. There was a form. He had to sign it personally. “Here I’m running this multibillion dollar organization with — at that time — 200,000 employees. And I’m having to approve reimbursements for somebody.”
Kizer set out to change that. He cut back on staffing at VA headquarters in Washington and at regional headquarters. He cut out layers in the chain of command. And he embraced the idea that statistics could allow the agency’s leaders to peer around those middlemen and see the bottom from the top.
In place of the clerk approving the reimbursement, Kizer substituted the System. But somewhere along the line Kizer forgot the Primitive. Somewhere deep down in the foundations of his 12 story bureaucracy, after you got past the shiny front end, some relay clicked, some bit was flipped or someone typed something that all made it work.
But whereas Forbes knew the whole edifice to be founded on the corrupt Primitive, Kizer’s shiny machinery elided that fact under 12 layers of bureaucracy. The statistics oozed out of the layers, anonymized, disinfected by its passage through software until it landed on the administrator’s desk.
The Primitive was forgotten. And so were the ghosts. The fact was that somewhere in the VA the “culture of corruption” had survived the fumigation. Because it was everywhere and nowhere to begin with. The Star Trek universe gave us perhaps the best description of the culture of corruption. It works like the Borg Mind, which is a property of the collective.
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