Bob Filner: “I yield myself such time as I may consume. As I said earlier, this is a bill that has a lot of good things in it, and I…”

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. As I said earlier, this is a bill that has a lot of good things in it, and I wish we had gone further. I met with the GAO this morning. They said they could follow up reports such as this with an investigation of personnel actions, for example, and could report back to us in terms that don't violate any civil service protections that they would provide a third party kind of review of the personnel actions that may have resulted from their recommendations. You don't have to answer now, but I would be prepared to work with the chair to request such an investigation, because what we have done here is, in response to the report that said reporting requirements were not met in hundreds of cases at some few selected sites that they examined, merely add new reporting requirements. They didn't follow the first ones, so what good are more reporting requirements going to do? There have to be some actions on the part of the Veterans Administration that say to our employees, that say to our veterans that there shall be no sexual assaults on our sites. Yet what we're saying here is, oh, we'll add a few more reporting requirements. That doesn't send a message, because we already had the reporting requirements.…”