The VA’s Difficulty With The New G.I. Bill

The Department of Veterans Affairs is in a pickle. Tasked by Congress to implement the new Post-9/11 G.I. Bill, the VA has failed to discover how it will complete the creation of a working program by the August 1^st, 2009 deadline (when the new benefits take effect).

In fact, the program has to be operational long before then so that the appropriate training can be done for VA education workers, and materials can be provided to assist veterans learn how to navigate the news system. However, the VA has run into some problems.

The original goal was to create an electronic claims system that will automatically process and pay tuition, housing, and other authorized expenses. The difficulty is that each student will be subject to different tuition authorizations and living expense based on geography and their conditions of military service. It is proving to be a logistics nightmare for programmers and education service officers.

The VA sought out a private contractor, which could work quickly and efficiently to resolve the logistical issue, but failed to find any takers who could meet the deadlines required.

Keith Wilson, VA’s education service director, said none of the proposals received by VA gave him “a level of confidence they could start up by Aug. 1.”

The VA will now have to manually process education benefits claims for the new program, just as it has done for other veterans’ benefits.

The process is slower — it takes an average of 19 days to process current GI Bill claims — and might include more errors than the 98 percent accuracy rate that was expected of contractors. But it will at least provide interim benefits while VA continues to work on a fully automated benefits processing system, Wilson said.

“We have been doing benefits for a long time,” he said. “We know how to do this. We just have to flip our priorities.”

The issue is that while the new G.I. Bill is a great piece of legislation, it was not fully vetted on how it will logistically be administered. It is a perfect example of why people feel government is inept— because law makers don’t get involved with their own edicts. It is like an engineer that never checks with the factory floor to see if they have the resources, manpower, and infrastructure to create a new product.

The ultimate victim will be the veteran who just wants his education— but the VA will be blamed for not being able to deliver a product that they had no contribution in creating.