Louisiana's Veterans Office Receives Criticizing Audit

The Louisiana agency that deals with benefits for veterans needs to improve its communications with the state's roughly 360,000 former soldiers, sailors and airmen, audit released this week says.

The Legislative Auditor's Office's report was critical of the Department of Veterans Affairs on two fronts: poor outreach to veterans and the scattered distribution of Veteran's Affairs offices around the state.

Auditors said the agency too often fails to communicate to veterans the benefits they're entitled to. Auditors also said the agency has too few workers in urban areas and too many in sparsely populated areas.

Lane Carson, secretary of the department and a decorated, combat-wounded Army veteran of the Vietnam War, said he agreed with some of the conclusions in the report. But defended his agency and its work on the day of the audit's release and in words more than a week ago at Barksdale Air Force Base.

"We're doing a damn good job," Carson said. "We're delivering the resources we've got."

Carson said state law requires that DVA workers be posted in every parish, with local governments partially paying for salaries and office space. And in his talk at Patrick Hall on Barksdale Feb. 7, he specifically cited his agency's activities and representatives in Bossier, Caddo, DeSoto and Webster parishes as among the most visible and most appreciated in the state, to loud applause from a crowd of hundreds of active-duty and retired military.

Carson said northwest Louisiana is one of his bragging areas in terms of the concentration of veterans, services and special facilities such as the Northwest Louisiana War Veterans Home, the Northwest Louisiana Veterans Cemetery and the federally run Overton Brooks VA Medical Center over which he has no control but that works hand-in-glove with his agency.

He said caring for the needs of veterans, who bring in well over a billion dollars to the state each year, is not just good sense, but an obligation for the sacrifices and services veterans rendered.

"How do you put a value on (that service?)" he asked the crowd at Barksdale. "How do you quantify paying back people who gave their lives, who gave their time, gave their families? You cannot, You can't quantify that, you cannot pay them back. It is a debt we owe our veterans for providing us security and freedom."