The organization that our group focused our assignment on was the VA. To be more specific, we focused on the VHA organization located in Hawaii. This was a terrific organization to study because we were given a wealth of information at our disposal to research. This was mainly due to the recent VA scandal that made nationwide news. The VA is the largest independent governmental department in the United States and it has a very important and specific purpose; to care for our nations veterans. Not surprisingly, this responsibility is of vital importance to many Americans which may account for why the scandal was so widely broadcast. Active military personnel, veterans and civilians alike were infuriated with how our veteran population was being treated. The corruption and long wait times were a focus for all of the major news agencies for months and coverage of this story is still ongoing despite drastic changes in the organization. It took a major scandal, months of media coverage and an outpouring of anger from the general population to induce change. The organization in which I was most recently employed was the Eaton Regional Education Services Agency. This is a mid-sized intermediate school district in western Michigan that services five school districts in Eaton County, Michigan. While the indiscretions of the human resources department at Eaton RESA are not on par with the VA’s scandal, it is safe for me to say that they have a wealth of problems that need to be addressed. As I have written in past papers, the business office at Eaton RESA was an extremely toxic environment. I worked in the business office and there always seemed to be a sense of dread in the office, especially when the HR director was mentioned. Her job description seemed to have come with two functions: Hiring and firing. The latter of these two seemed to be her specialty. To me, this mirrors the stifling environment of the VA perfectly. On multiple occasions I witnessed people complain to her about the toxic work environment that was created in the office. On both occasions the employees were let go within the month due to insubordination. Observing how my previous workplace’s HR director treated employees gave me a great example of how not to do things. After taking HR 371 I can already pinpoint a few spots that are in dire need of changing. It would be a massive understatement to say that the HR director at Eaton RESA had problems with communication. As I said before, negative feedback was met with met with firings. Employees quickly learned to shut up and do what they were told. She was in direct violation of habit eighteen in Marshall Goldsmith’s book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”, which is “Punishing the Messenger”. Being a part of the business office, I was partially immune to this particular form of mistreatment to a large degree, but I wasn’t completely invulnerable to it. Whenever I had to report to her that a bill would have to be paid late or that one of our vendors had failed to make a payment I was given a long sigh and an eye roll. While I understood that she wasn’t directly angry at me, this still communicated to me that giving her bad news would upset her and I would get a negative response. I often had urges to withhold bad news from her because I knew that I would get negative responses. The type of behavior goes hand in hand with what how the VA first handled reports of misconduct before the scandal erupted. Sam Foote is the doctor that first blew the whistle and wrote the report that started the investigations on the VA. Dr. Foote stated that he witnessed severe retaliations taken against his co-workers when they tried to report misconduct. He is quoted as saying “They started coming after me” when he tried to lodge a complaint against a high ranking VA official in 2013. It is easy to create an environment in which malfeasance can go on in this type of environment. My research of the VA and my own personal observations have shown me what shooting the messenger can do to an organization. It brought down a tremend