In 2021, an employee with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Aurora, Colorado, alerted leadership to a troubling practice within the federal agency’s Eastern Colorado Health Care System, a vast network providing services for 100,000 veterans.
The whistleblower worked for the Prosthetic and Sensory Aids Service, which supplies military veterans with artificial limbs, wheelchairs, surgical implants, glasses, hearing aids and other devices to help them live more functional lives.
Many veterans, however, weren’t getting these services for up to a year — or at all, the whistleblower alleged. That’s because the head of the prosthetics department, Norma Mestas, was directing staff to delete orders as if they had never come in, three former employees who worked in the department told The Denver Post. The motive, they said: reduce wait times and backlogs to make it look as though the department was operating smoothly.
The orders, up to 2,500 at one point, would remain untouched for months, the employees said. Some vets in the end would never get their devices, they alleged.
“I have seen (the prosthetics) service go from broken to highly functioning under our former chief to almost immediately start to crumble and end up where we are today, broken worse than I could have ever imagined,” the whistleblower wrote to VA leadership in an April 2022 follow-up email reviewed by The Post.
This individual, whom The Post agreed not to…
