One Door, Every Answer: Introducing the Utah Veterans Ombudsman and Accountability Act
Updated: Oct 24
On October 14, at the Utah Veterans Town Hall and Roundtable in Sandy, I talked publicly for the first time about something I've spent five months building with veterans service organizations and other veteran groups: the Utah Veterans Ombudsman and Accountability Act. Jonny Larsen brought up the bureaucracy veterans keep slamming into, and I answered with this. You get a few minutes on a panel. Here's the whole thing.
The short version: Utah creates one independent office where any veteran, or anyone in a veteran's family, can bring any problem. That office owns the request and stays on it until someone can tell you, with evidence, what happened. Once a year, it publishes a report card grading how the VA, the state, and everyone else serving Utah veterans is actually doing, on a website anyone can open.
That's the idea. All through this campaign, I've talked about transparency and showing your work. So yes, this post is long, and that's on purpose. I'm going to walk you through this bill the way I'd want any candidate to walk me through one: how it works, why I built it the way I did, and the parts I'm still working out.
Every link can be right and the veteran still loses
Veterans don't live in one system. We live in about a dozen. Your health care might run through the VA medical center and a Community Care provider at the same time. Your disability claim runs through the VA and whoever represents you. Your GI Bill runs through the VA, your school's certifying official, and maybe a state program on top. A veteran in crisis can go through behavioral health, a jail, a courtroom, a shelter, and a job program in the same year without one of them asking whether that person ever served.
Every one of those places has its own rules, its own forms, and its own idea of what "done" means. Each can truthfully say it did its part. The veteran still walks out with nothing, because the veteran lives it as one life and nobody owns the whole path.
I'm an Air Force, Utah Air National Guard, and Utah Army National Guard veteran, and I've gotten lost in these systems myself. In 15 years of advocacy, I've heard the same story from more veterans than I can count. You call. You get transferred. You get told it's not their department. You finally file a complaint, someone tells you it went to HR as a personnel matter, and that's the last you ever hear of it.
Here's what should make every one of us angry: none of that is an accident. It's how the system is built. When nobody owns the whole path, nobody has to answer for where it breaks. Employee privacy is real, and I'll defend it. But somewhere along the way, protecting an employee's file turned into protecting the institution from ever having to say whether it fixed anything. Veterans pay for that. Institutions almost never do.
And it doesn't stop with us. A friend of mine lost her mother. To get her parents buried together at the state veterans cemetery out by Camp Williams in Bluffdale, the family needed a discharge record. She spent more than a week bouncing between the VA medical center, the cemetery, and a federal online records system trying to get it. She never served a day. Her problem crossed a federal records system and a state cemetery, so no single office owned it. She should have spent that week grieving.
One door
The office is the place you go when you don't know where to go.
Veteran, spouse, kid, caregiver, survivor. Bring whatever you've got: a records problem, a benefits question, a complaint, or something stuck between two agencies that each swear it belongs to the other one. You don't have to figure out who's responsible. That's the office's job. If you served, Guard and Reserve included, you can walk through that door no matter how long you served or how you were discharged. That doesn't make anyone eligible for a benefit they weren't eligible for before. It just means nobody gets turned away from help finding the right path.
This isn't a complaint office. Most people who need help don't think of themselves as filing a complaint. They just need the thing fixed. So the bill treats everything that comes through the door as a request for assistance, and a complaint is just one kind of request. Whether you're reporting something that went wrong or just trying to figure out who handles what, you walk through the same door and get the same follow-through.
You can reach the office by phone, in writing, in person, or through a secure website. That front door should be open at midnight. A veteran in crisis, or a surviving spouse who can't face one more phone tree, shouldn't have to wait until Monday at 8 a.m. to start.
Families and survivors are written into the office's purpose, not tacked on at the end. That means help getting a DD-214 and service records, burial and memorial benefits, and survivor compensation, pension, and health care. My friend's case is the whole office in miniature. The discharge record is federal, so getting it is federal-side advocacy. The cemetery is a state facility, squarely Utah's. One request, two systems, and under this bill, one office that takes it in and stays with it until it's done.
Referral is not resolution
If you remember one line from this post, make it that one.
Every accepted request gets a case number and a person whose name is on it. If it has to go to another agency, the office confirms it landed, keeps tracking it, and follows up until it can document what happened. Handing a veteran another phone number isn't mission complete.
The office also has to be honest about "closed" versus "resolved," because they aren't the same thing. Sometimes a case closes because every lawful avenue ran out, or the information was legally withheld, or another agency declined to act. Fine. Write that down, and say so in the public numbers. What you don't get to do is count a dead end as a win because somebody closed a file. When a case ends, the veteran gets a plain-English explanation of what was confirmed, what's still unknown, and what options are left.
Most days, this office won't look dramatic. It'll be navigation, phone calls, accredited help with VA claims and appeals, and a lot of fixing broken handoffs. It works with the VSOs and county veterans service officers, not around them. They're good at what they do. The gap is that nobody follows a veteran across all of it.
When the complaint is about your care
This is where this bill started for me. I've lived this one myself, and I'm not going to put the details in a blog post. Since I started building this legislation, I've heard some version of it from veteran after veteran.
A veteran gets dismissed by a provider. Or handled roughly. Or gets care that falls below the standard any clinic should meet. Sometimes it's worse: abuse, neglect, a chart that doesn't match what happened in the room. The veteran does what they're supposed to do and reports it. The complaint goes to a patient advocate, then up to a service chief, then into a personnel process, and then the door closes. The veteran is told it's a personnel matter and they won't be told the outcome. They never learn whether that provider is still seeing patients, whether anything changed, or whether the next veteran will walk into the same exam room.
Think about what that silence teaches. It teaches veterans that reporting is pointless. And it teaches every institution that the fastest way to make a complaint disappear is to call it a personnel matter.
The bill splits that into two questions. The first is what happened to the employee. That can stay confidential, and it should, because due process for employees is real. The second is what happened to the problem. Was the complaint actually reviewed? Was the veteran's care fixed? Did the institution take corrective action? Did the same thing happen again? The office keeps asking those questions, and it has to record an honest answer. If the institution confirms it fixed the problem without naming names, the case says corrective action confirmed. If the institution won't say, the case says the outcome was withheld, on the record, in a report the Legislature reads. Silence stops passing for resolution.
Then there's the license. Doctors, nurses, and other clinicians working at the VA still hold state licenses, and the VA's own federal policy is to report a clinician to the state licensing board when their practice seriously fails accepted standards, including neglect, abuse, falsified records, and unethical behavior. That's the policy on paper. A veteran has no way to know whether it happened. This office doesn't wait to find out. When a case turns up a reasonable basis, the office sends the evidence to the board that holds that license, in Utah or any other state, and tracks what happens. The office doesn't discipline anyone. The board decides, with full due process. But the concern lands on the right desk instead of dying in an HR file.
Some of these are the hardest things a person will ever report: military sexual trauma, assault, abuse. Those get the strongest protections in the bill. A veteran can come to the office confidentially without authorizing a full investigation. Nobody's name goes public without their written consent. Retaliation against anyone who seeks the office's help is barred, anywhere Utah law reaches. When the facts can't be independently confirmed, the office doesn't pretend they were, but it can still use what it learns, stripped of identifying details, to spot a pattern across many cases.
That pattern is the point. One complaint can be waved off. Twenty complaints about the same clinic, sitting in one office's records, can't. How an institution handles these complaints, and whether the same failures keep coming back, goes straight into its grade.
A veteran who reports abuse should never be the last person to find out what happened.
Access is part of care
Care you can't get to isn't care. A veteran who can't get an exam table they can use, can't get an interpreter, can't bring their service dog, or gets told their accommodation is "against facility policy" hasn't been treated. They've been turned away politely.
Most people don't know this: the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn't apply to VA facilities. Federal agencies answer to a different law, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, with its own rules and its own complaint process. Private Community Care providers fall under the ADA. State facilities fall under the ADA's rules for state government. So a veteran with a disability can be living under three different sets of rules in the same month, depending on which door they walked through, and nobody hands them the map.
Under this bill, a denied accommodation is a request like any other, and the office owns it. Inside Utah's reach, at state facilities, state programs, and state contractors, the office can investigate, make findings, and require a written response. When the VA is involved, the office helps the veteran file in the right federal channel, documents what happened, refers it up the federal chain when that's warranted, and tracks it to an answer.
Sometimes the problem isn't one clinic. It's the rule itself. A federal policy can be written loosely enough that each facility invents its own exceptions, and the veteran gets a different answer depending on which building they're standing in. When the office sees that pattern, it can recommend a formal petition to fix the rule, and the Attorney General has to file it or explain in writing why not. That answer goes in the public report.
Accommodation complaints feed the same records, the same patterns, and the same public grades as everything else. The office holds itself to that standard too. Intake works by phone, in writing, in person, and online, and both websites have to meet state accessibility standards, screen readers included. An accountability office veterans with disabilities couldn't use would be its own punchline.
Equal access to care is the law. Veterans shouldn't have to fight a building to get it.
What Utah can and can't do
I want to be straight about the limits, because if I oversell this, the first VA lawyer who reads it will take it apart. Utah can't order the VA around, and the bill says so in plain words. The office can't subpoena the VA, overturn a rating decision, or discipline a federal employee.
That doesn't leave us empty-handed. With a veteran's permission, the office can pull records, file federal records requests and appeals, refer cases to the VA Inspector General, bring in our congressional offices, and put on the public record what it could prove and what it couldn't get. It can also take a clinician's conduct to the board that holds their license, as I covered above.
Inside Utah, the office has teeth. It can investigate state agencies, state programs, and state contractors. My first version of this had no subpoena power. I wanted a pure ombudsman, cooperative and resolution-first. Then I kept running into the problem every ombudsman runs into. When an institution decides to wait you out, you've got nothing. An office that can be ignored will be.
So the bill adds a narrow backstop. The office asks first, in writing. If a Utah agency or contractor refuses or ignores the request, the office can issue a narrowly tailored subpoena. Enforcement goes through the Attorney General and the courts, never the office acting alone, and the AG has to either act or put a declination in writing. That keeps the power real without letting it turn into a club.
The report card
I didn't get time for this on the panel, and it's the part I care about most.
Casework fixes one veteran's problem. It doesn't tell you whether the same thing is happening to the next fifty people in line. So every year, the office grades the institutions that serve Utah veterans, by name, in public.
That means VA facilities. Community Care. State agencies and programs. State contractors. And the Utah Department of Veterans and Military Affairs itself, the same department this office is housed in. More on how that works in a minute.
Individual employees don't get grades. If a person did something wrong, that goes to the licensing board or the disciplinary process, not a letter grade on a website.
Now, a grade built only on complaints would be garbage. A clinic everyone trusts might get more complaints precisely because veterans know how to reach it. So the grades stand on three legs.
First, how the place actually performed when something went wrong. Did it respond, and how fast? Did referrals get finished? Did it fix the problem, or did the same failure come back next year? Did it follow the law?
Second, veterans themselves. Every year, the office runs a statewide survey offered to as many Utah veterans as the state can lawfully reach. It goes out by mail, online, text and by phone, and in person at jails, shelters, treatment courts, and behavioral health programs, because the veterans with the worst experiences are often the ones without a stable address. Veterans grade the places they actually used, A through F, and those answers roll up into a Veteran Experience Score for each institution. That's how you hear from the huge number of veterans who never file a complaint. Your survey answer can never be used to open a case or identify you. You should be able to give a clinic an F without wondering whether you just started a file with your name on it.
Third, whatever the office's own investigations turn up.
How those three combine is a genuinely hard statistics question, and I'm not the one who should answer it. The bill hands the weighting to a qualified statistician and public rulemaking, with public comment, instead of freezing numbers into law we'd be stuck with for a decade.
Every named institution sees its proposed grade at least 30 days before it's final. It can correct facts, add evidence, show what it fixed, and attach a statement that gets published right next to its grade. When the evidence is thin, the grade says "insufficient data" instead of a made-up letter. The VA doesn't get dinged for declining cooperation the state can't legally demand. VA care and Community Care get graded separately and never ranked against each other. I'm not interested in the public-versus-private food fight. I want to know whether veterans fall through the crack in the handoff between them.
Some people will read all those protections as going soft. I see it the other way. A grade that falls apart the first time an agency's lawyers read it protects nobody.
Here's a question I can't answer yet: how will the VA respond to a public grade it doesn't control? Maybe it engages. Maybe it ignores it. Either way, the grade, the evidence behind it, and the VA's own statement, if it gives one, will be sitting on a public website. That's leverage veterans don't have today.
A website anyone can open
A report that sits in a filing cabinet changes nothing. Put it where any veteran, reporter, or neighbor can pull it up, and every institution in it starts behaving differently. For most of the places this office grades, that visibility is the enforcement.
So the grades and the annual report live on a permanent public website, built in layers. The top layer is plain English: key findings, grades, and whether things are getting better or worse. Underneath is everything a reporter or researcher needs to check the work: full reports, methodology, grade history, findings, whether corrective action actually happened, and data you can download yourself.
The site will have a plain-language AI assistant. Ask it how veterans fared in Utah's justice system this year, or how a facility's grade has moved over three years, and it answers from the published reports and shows you which report it pulled from so you can check it.
I know how that sounds. "AI" and "veterans' records" in the same sentence should make anybody nervous. So it's built so there's nothing to leak. The assistant runs on a completely separate system that holds only published, aggregate numbers, with no connection back to case files. If somebody broke into it tomorrow, or the AI turned out to have a weakness nobody saw coming, there'd be nothing private behind it to reach. It doesn't take requests for help and doesn't keep what you type. If you need help, it sends you to the intake site.
That intake site is separate too, and it runs one direction. Your request goes into the protected case system and never comes back out. The only way it ever reaches the public is as a number in the annual report.
One report, every year, in public
Right now, what Utah knows about its veterans is scattered all over state government. Corrections knows something. The courts know something. Homeless service providers, colleges, workforce services, VSOs, and the department each hold a piece. Nobody puts the pieces together, so nobody sees the picture.
The Annual State of Utah's Veterans Report puts it together. Part one is what the office did with every request. Part two is how the institutions performed, including the grades and the Attorney General's yearly accounting of every enforcement request the office made and what came of it. Part three is how Utah veterans are actually doing: housing, justice involvement, health, jobs, school, and benefits.
It also counts the earned federal benefits the office's casework secured for Utah veterans and families. That number gets reported. It never becomes a target. The minute you start judging caseworkers by dollars recovered, the veteran with a messy, low-dollar problem goes to the back of the line, and I won't build that.
The department keeps its own annual report, in its own words, on its own schedule. The Ombudsman's report pulls in the department's data, labeled as the department's, without touching it.
The report gets presented in public at a November interim committee meeting and goes to every legislator the same day, early enough to shape bills and budgets before the next session. Every version is aggregate and de-identified. A legislator sees the pattern. Nobody sees the veteran.
Finding veterans where they already are
You can't help veterans you can't find, and a lot of systems never ask. A veteran can go through a jail booking, a probation office, or a shelter without anybody learning they wore the uniform.
This part came straight from the field. I've sat down with sheriffs and prosecutors from both parties, officeholders and candidates alike, and they told me the same thing: missing veteran identification in the justice system is a gap they want the authority to close. One prosecutor, an Army veteran himself, asked me for numbers. How many veterans come through veterans court, and how many come back? He wants that data, and the state should be able to give it to him.
Under the bill, every state agency would be required to ask one standard question, “Have you served?”, and answering it would always be voluntary. That includes state-run intake at prisons and at Adult Probation and Parole. County jails, prosecutors' offices, homeless outreach teams, and treatment programs get the authority to ask, not a mandate. The courts are invited in. It doesn't apply to traffic or patrol stops, and nobody's services or release ever depend on answering.
The hard part was the follow-up. If you want a veteran in jail to tell you about a bad-paper discharge, that veteran has to believe it won't follow them into their case. Otherwise they stay quiet, and the help and the data both disappear. So the fuller questionnaire is handled by the office or a partner, outside the jail, court, and prosecution file, and Utah law bars using it against the person in any state proceeding. What never goes into the file can't be pulled out of it. With the veteran's written consent, the office can also refer them to veterans treatment court or another diversion program.
A veteran who says yes might find a path to treatment instead of a cell.
Independent, even from its own landlord
The office is housed inside the Utah Department of Veterans and Military Affairs for payroll, office space, and IT. Everything that matters, it controls itself. The department can't direct an investigation, poke through case files, change a finding, bump a grade up or down, or edit the report. The office gets its own line in the budget.
That firewall matters because the office grades state programs, the department included. You can't grade the boss who signs your paycheck. So complaints about the department, or about the Ombudsman's own office, go to the State Auditor, and the State Auditor independently reviews the department's grade before it's published.
Why not make it a standalone agency? It'd be cleaner on paper. It would also mean duplicating payroll, procurement, IT, and office space, plus a fatter fiscal note. I took the tradeoff: use the infrastructure we already have, and write the independence into law instead of hoping for it. Utah already does exactly this. The state's ombudsman offices for property rights, homeowners' associations, long-term care, child protection, and disability each work from inside an existing department. Veterans have earned an advocate built the same way.
The Ombudsman has to be a veteran, nominated from a slate the Veterans Advisory Council submits, appointed by the governor, and confirmed by the Senate for a six-year term. No partisan office while serving, and removal only for cause.
"Isn't this just another bureaucracy?"
It was the first question I got when I started sharing this, and it's a fair one.
Anyone who has worked veteran cases in Utah knows the department already has caseworkers, investigators, and support staff doing a lot of this work. They're good. They're also spread across the department with no single front door and no case system that follows a veteran from one agency to the next. The bill pulls them under one mission. Of roughly nine positions at full strength, about six are existing department positions that move over with the money already funding them. Three are new: the Ombudsman, a deputy, and an executive assistant.
Which positions move is something I still have to work out with the commissioner, and I'd rather do that sitting across the table than dictate it in a blog post. The bill sets guardrails: transfers happen with the commissioner's approval, no transfer can leave a department service short-handed, nothing tied to federal funding moves unless the federal terms allow it, and transferred staff answer only to the Ombudsman.
I won't tell you it's free. The secure case system, the annual survey, and the two websites cost real money, and the bill says so. But most of this is reorganizing work the state already pays for. And every time the office's casework gets a veteran or a surviving spouse the federal benefit they earned, that money comes home to a Utah household.
I thought about putting a sunset date on it, the way a lot of new programs get one, and decided against it. Instead, once the office has a few years of track record, the Legislative Auditor General audits it and asks the only question that matters: is it actually keeping requests from disappearing? If it isn't, lawmakers will see that in black and white.
If it passes in the 2027 session, the Act would take effect July 1, 2027. The first annual report would come in November 2028, with grades only where the evidence is solid enough to stand on, and the first full grading cycle in November 2029.
What it won't do
It won't give Utah control of the VA, overturn a benefits decision or a court order, or make a protected personnel file public. It doesn't replace the VA, VSOs, county veterans service officers, patient advocates, or licensing boards. And nobody can promise every veteran the outcome they want. What this promises is that somebody has to account for what happened.
Why I have to win this seat
I've done veterans advocacy for 15 years, and I've learned how often veterans get left out simply because nobody in the room thought of them. When the new Salt Lake City airport was planned, there was no USO in it. I raised it, and it took legislators, airport authority staff, and a lot of stakeholders to get it in. In 2021, we pushed to open Utah's senior-citizen college access program to veterans, and it took finding the right sponsors to get it across the line.
That's how it works from the outside. You build the case, then you go find somebody with a vote to carry it. This ombudsman bill is one of several I have ready for Utah's veteran community. I'd rather carry them myself.
Veterans hold less than 5 percent of the seats in Utah's Legislature. With so few of us at the table, the laws that shape veterans' lives get written by people who've never chased a DD-214, sat on hold waiting for a VA clinic, or watched a complaint vanish into HR. That's not a knock on anybody's character. It's a gap in experience, and veterans are the ones who pay for it. If we want veterans' issues to have a real seat at the table, we have to put more veterans in those seats.
I still believe government can be worthy of the people it serves. This office is one way to make it prove it.
Tell me where you got lost
If you're a Utah veteran, a spouse, a caregiver, or a survivor, and you've been bounced, ignored, or lost in a system that was supposed to serve you, tell me what happened at drew@howells4utah.com. Start with a general description, and please don't send medical records or sensitive documents. Nothing you share gets used publicly without your permission.
If you're a reporter, a veterans organization, an agency, or anyone who wants to dig into the details, call me at 385-206-9256 or email the same address. I'll walk you through all of it.
And on November 3, vote.
We don't leave people behind on the battlefield. We shouldn't leave them behind in a filing cabinet.
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