Many of your witnesses have commented about changing the culture. I think the apparatus itself is well in place and the interventions are good. Having caseworkers who are former members is a huge benefit. He looks like you, sounds like you, understands what you've been through, and speaks your language.
Again, from the testimonies I heard earlier, you share so many of the same problems. There are a lot of good interventions, and the program is built to do good things. But we're paying a trust tax at lower levels of bureaucracy, where an individual who is processing a piece of paperwork or needs a signature—oh, this box isn't checked, he missed a signature—doesn't have the authority at his or her level to exercise judgment. So that norm has to be broken. The trust tax has to be taken off both the member, people like Mark, and certainly the individual doing the middle-level management in that face-to-face casework, for sure.
In the Department of Veterans Affairs in the U.S, the experience varies widely. You can have great caseworkers and you can have awful ones. It's difficult in a big bureaucracy, for sure.