For the longest time, Rustyann Brown felt like no one would listen as she tried to raise the alarm about how the Oakland VA regional benefits office was failing Northern California veterans.

Not anymore. On Wednesday, Brown will have the attention of top lawmakers.

She is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill before a House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing that will examine troubling allegations that the Oakland and Philadelphia regional offices have mismanaged benefit claims from vets.

“I’m going to lay it all out for them,” said Brown, a former Oakland Veterans Affairs employee who told her story to this newspaper in March. “Then it will be up to the government to take that ball and run with it. After what I’ve seen the last few years, I have my doubts that anything will get fixed. But this is all an average person can do.”

Brown has been the most visible of five whistleblowers who alleged that more than 13,000 claims from veterans and surviving spouses were stuffed away in a file cabinet at the Oakland office. Brown was part of a team tasked to review those claims, and she was appalled to discover some dated back to the mid-1990s, and many of those vets had died waiting for help from the VA.

When she found some of those claims piled on a file cart months later, still unprocessed, Brown and other employees went to Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Oroville.

What exactly happened to those claims remains a point of contention.

A February report from the VA Office of Inspector General found that Oakland managers conceded that 13,184 claims were improperly stored in the file cabinet. But investigators couldn’t verify that count due to “poor record keeping practices.”

Allison Hickey, the VA undersecretary for benefits, later told a congressional subcommittee that the cabinet only held duplicate copies of processed claims and that no veteran ever was shortchanged.

The House committee is expected to probe those conflicting explanations. Oakland Director Julianna Boor also is scheduled to be in Washington, D.C.

According to a recent internal email from Boor, a team of senior VA leaders conducted an audit at the Oakland and Sacramento offices last week to ensure there were “no loose claims materials.”

In a separate email to staff, Boor added: “I’m very grateful for the opportunity to tell Congress and our leadership about the great work you are doing and your continued ‘moxy’ in rolling up your sleeves and getting the job done for our veterans.”

Brown provided those emails to this newspaper after receiving them from a current Oakland employee.

Also being addressed Wednesday is another inspector general report released last week that blasted the Philadelphia office. Among the findings was that 31,000 inquiries from vets were unanswered for an average of 312 days and that dozens of boxes of mailed claims to the Philadelphia office had not been scanned into the VA’s virtual database.

“We believe that it’s extremely important to get all the facts on the record,” said Lauren Price, co-founder of the Florida-based Veteran Warriors advocacy group. “Rusty’s dedication has been unbelievable, and she is so wrapped around the axle about what’s been happening in Oakland. But I tell people that these malfeasance and corruption problems are systemwide.”

The VA has been stumbling from one crisis to another. Allegations of secret wait lists and data manipulation in the hospital system — beginning in Phoenix — led to the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki last year.

Even before that, the VA’s benefits operation was embroiled in a national scandal involving a backlog of claims by vets seeking compensation for service-connected injuries and ailments. By 2012, the VA was in crisis and Oakland, which serves 780,000 veterans throughout Northern California, was singled out for having some of the worst wait times.

In one of her emails to employees, Boor noted that Oakland has made great strides. She said at the peak of the problem in March 2012, there were 35,000 pending claims, while now there are 16,000. Backlogged claims — those unprocessed for more than 125 days — also had dropped from 30,000 to less than 8,000.

The average time to decide a disability claim had been reduced from 593 days in June 2013 to 240 days now, wrote Boor, who became Oakland’s executive director last year.

On the same day of the hearing, new VA Secretary Robert McDonald is scheduled to visit the Oakland office as part of a tour of Bay Area facilities and meetings to discuss veterans issues.

Meanwhile, Brown said she is prepared to be portrayed Wednesday as a disgruntled former employee.

“Damn straight, I’m disgruntled,” added Brown, who took early retirement from the Oakland office last fall. “From the moment I got to that place, the managers did everything they could to be adversarial to veterans and not help them. So I’m proud of being disgruntled. Who knew that just being honest and telling the truth would cause such uproar?”

Follow Mark Emmons at Twitter.com/markedwinemmons.