Thomas Breen died on November 30, 2013. His death certificate shows that he died from bladder cancer. His family said that the VA called on December 6, 2013, to make an appointment after Breen had died. Sam Foote, who retired after 24 years of service with the Phoenix VA system, went public with allegations against the VHA in comments to CNN in April 2014. He said that there was an "official" list at the Phoenix VA that was sent to Washington officials and showed that appointments were timely, and an unofficial list where veterans may wait for care for more than a year. Foote said, "The scheme was deliberately put in place to avoid the VA's own internal rules". He said that workers at the Phoenix VA were intimidated into complying with the deception. "They have families, they have mortgages and if they speak out or say anything to anybody about it, they will be fired and they know that." A scheduler at an Austin, Texas, VHA care clinic said that the practice of "zeroing out" delays in appointments "wasn't a secret at all" at the clinic, and he was instructed by a supervisor in how the process worked. The Austin scheduler said that said "zeroing out" was a practice of falsifying information in the VA’s records system that Washington officials used to monitor patient wait times. VA Deputy Undersecretary for Health Administrative Operations William Schoenhard wrote a memo on March 15, 2013 indicating that the VA was changing its performance measure for appointment wait times. The new goal involved measuring the number of days between a veteran's desired appointment date and the actual date of the appointment. A VA Office of the Medical Inspector report from December 2013 showed a dramatic change in March 2013 of the number of appointments booked within the 14-day window for the Ft. Collins, Colorado outpatient clinic. When investigators asked VA employees to explain "what occurred in March 2013" the employees said that "they were instructed by Business office staff to access the appointment schedule, review it for capacity, inform the Veteran of schedule availability, and then enter the Desired Date as the patient appointment date" and "By entering the Desired Date as the appointment date, the wait time … appears to be zero days." The Ft. Collins clinic is overseen by the Cheyenne, Wyoming, Veterans Affairs office. A coordinator at the Cheyenne office sent an email on June 19, 2013 with instructions on how to manipulate the appointment dates. The coordinator wrote, "Yes, it is gaming the system a bit, but you have to know the rules of the game you are playing.”