The Department of Veteran Affairs conducted a surprise inspection of its regional Los Angeles office only to discover that the office has been shredding unopened mail from local veterans. Again.

In 2008, a nationwide review of all 57 regional offices found that 41 were shredding the wrong documents. Only 500 documents were erroneously destroyed.

“We can’t tolerate even one veteran’s piece of paper being missing,” a VA official said at the time. “We’re taking action to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Skip forward to 2014, when it was revealed that tens of thousands of claim documents were purposely shredded to cover up inefficiency in the system.

Skip forward again to last January, when more unopened envelopes containing disability claims were found lined up for the shredder in LA. Sorting mail can be hard, but this is getting ridiculous.

According to VA policy, correspondence must be opened, read and then initialed by the VA employee and supervisor that looked at them before being sent to the shredder. The LA office didn’t open or initial its envelopes. Now the government is conducting widespread inspections of VA offices to sniff out any more illicit shredding.

The Office of the Inspector General explained in a recently released report that tossing unopened mail into shred bins “would have prevented the documents from becoming part of the veterans’ permanent record and potentially affect veterans’ benefits.”