February 14, 2013

Subcommittee Examines Post 9/11 GI Bill Claims Processing

Washington, D.C.  – Today, the Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs held a hearing on increasing the functionality of Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) claims processing for the Post 9/11 GI Bill. Veteran student advocate witnesses at the hearing testified that veterans continue to have concerns about delays and the ability to access information about their benefits.

“We have spent $263 million dollars on a system and questions still remain on its effectiveness, its completion and our return on investment. It’s clear we need to make improvements, especially given that it’s the veteran who ultimately pays the price for delays,” said Rep. Mark Takano (CA-41), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity. “We need to work with the VA to make this system more functional and ensure that adequate support is offered to our student veterans.”

The Post-9/11 GI Bill was signed into law in June 2008 and provides educational assistance for veterans and members of the armed forces who served on or after September 11, 2001, and the VA was charged with processing these new education benefits. VA concluded at the time that its legacy systems and manual processes were insufficient to support the new benefits and, therefore, began an initiative to modernize its benefits processing capabilities.

VA’s long-term solution was to provide a fully automated end-to-end information technology (IT) system to support the delivery of benefits by December 2010. VA chose an incremental development approach, called Agile software development, which is intended to deliver functionality in short increments before the system is fully deployed. VA has made important progress in delivering key automated capabilities to process the new education benefits. The Agile process was intended to allow VA the flexibility to accommodate legislative changes and provide functionality according to business priorities. Originally, VA had plans to include full self-service capabilities to veterans, but instead it now intends to provide this capability later in time. Current expenditures on the initiative are around $263 million with additional time and effort required for a finished product.