st. pete times at that point.ut when i look back at it, it seems to me that the writing helps me in three different ways. one was that at first i just flashed out everything, the grave come, the anger and the loss in my journal. and then at some point i began to realize that i had been enormously helped by books that other people i've written about suicide, about depression, about soldiering and it began to seem to me that what i was doing in my journal was telling the story of my grief but i wasn't telling the story of my son, whereas my experience day by day was brief memory, brief memory, brief memory and there arose a new desire to tell his story which i know it's not his story of his story. it's mine. he would not have told the story in the same way and he would not have come to the conclusions that i came to. but it was a way for me to try to understand through his life what had happened to him. you never come to an understanding. there comes a place that you can go no further as carson says that was the imp

st. pete times at that point.t when i look back at it, it seems to me that the writing helps me in three different ways. one was that at first i just flashed out everything, the grave come, the anger and the loss in my journal. and then at some point i began to realize that i had been enormously helped by books that other people i've written about suicide, about depression, about soldiering and it began to seem to me that what i was doing in my journal was telling the story of my grief but i wasn't telling the story of my son, whereas my experience day by day was brief memory, brief memory, brief memory and there arose a new desire to tell his story which i know it's not his story of his story. it's mine. he would not have told the story in the same way and he would not have come to the conclusions that i came to. but it was a way for me to try to understand through his life what had happened to him. you never come to an understanding. there comes a place that you can go no further as carson says that was the impu

times. once a claim is given a provisional rating, it's not counted toward the back log. however, the claim has no final rating. it's still unresolved. in summary, at st. pete, the employees work hard to serve veterans and complete the work competent incidently. however, we have found that employees avoid appealing quality error calls, because they fear reprisals. when employees do clear the airs, they're overturned at least 30% of the time. we did some figuring out, and we believe that if employees were not afraid to appeal these errors, the total number of claims with errors overturned may be troubling. to date, to excuse the back log and other processing problems, many employees are performance improvement plans. we were interested and we checked. not one manager at st. pete is on a performance improvement lan. the total number of errors have been overturned can be great. we just need to need. any employee who complains is met with severe consequences. once again, i'd like to thank the committee for providing me the opportunity to share my views. i will be happy to take any answers. thank you. >> thank you very much, mr. soto. we're going to start a roun

times. once a claim is given a provisional rating, it's not counted toward the backlog. however, the claim has no final rating. it's still unresolved. in summary, at st. pete, the employees work hard to serve veterans and complete their work competently. however, we have found that employees avoid appealing quality error calls because they fear reprisareprisal. when employees do appeal the errors, they are overturned at least 30% of the time. we did some figuring out and we believe that if employees were not afraid to appeal these errors, the total number of claims with errors overturned may be troubling. to date, to excuse the backlog and other processing problems, many employees are on performance improvement plans. well, we were interested and we checked. not one manager at st. pete is on a performance improvement plan. the total number of errors overturned can be great. we just have to check. nobody's checking. any employee that complains is met with severe consequences. once again, i would like to thank the committee for providing me the opportunity to share my views. i will be happy to take any questions. thank you. >> thank you very much, mr. soto.