good afternoon ladies and gentlemen the committee on veterans affairs subcommittee on economic opportunity oversight hearing on the post nine eleven g i bill long term solution will come to order and i ask unanimous consent that all members have five legislative days to revise and extend their remarks in that written statements made part of the record hearing no objection so ordered some of those in attendance may recall that our first hearing of two thousand and nine was on the implementation of the post nine eleven g i bill this was followed up by supplemental hearings t s progress on the short and long term information technology solutions i hope that it's clear to our palace for us today that by making this our first hearing of two thousand and ten we demonstrate the continued importance of the subject at hand i'm sure my colleagues will agree that the current delays in processing education claims are simply unacceptable a number of my colleagues not on this committee have spoken to me directly or written to me documenting experiences student veterans that they represent who have suffered some of the consequences of the delays in processing these claims while the administration i know shares my concerns regarding  shortcomings more has to be done however the blame doesn't rest solely with the v a the processing of a single claim requires multiple steps involving multiple parties and computer systems all of which must work in sync with one another in order for that train to still receive his or her benefits in a timely manner these computer difficulties demonstrate the need for a fully functional long term solution furthermore the subcommittee's staff recent recently visited the v a v a s regional processing center an education call center in muskogee oklahoma and some concerns have been raised from that visit they include the closure of education call center hours on thursdays and fridays that provides veterans only three days to call for assistance on education matters while we understand the value of using call center staff to process education claims the v a can have the call center open five days a week by dispersing the same work hours throughout the week second the availability of temporary employees after september two thousand and ten is a concern while we all would like to have a fully operational long term solution by december of this year the reality limited timeframe to implement this complex i t system may require the v a to push back its deadline ensuring that v a has the trained personnel to continue to process education claims and field incoming calls can help avoid furthe delays in receipt of education benefits the third concern involves v a s current policy limiting education call center operators from taking action on education claims outside of that particular region the current policy requires that claims originating outside of most of the muskogee region must be referred to the appropriate regional office for action we've been informed by off authorizing these operators who are responsible for taking all education benefit called to make simple updates to a veterans file would result in faster service and avoid long wait periods for action and finally the visit to the education call center raised equipment concerns that create dropped calls and require constant  maintenance that i hope the v a will address quickly so i look forward to hearing from our distinguished panelists participating in today's hearing specifically on how the u s department of veterans affairs is addressing these concerns and making progress in him lamenting it's a long term solution that seeks to streamline the way education claims are currently process now like to recognize the ranking member mr both than for any opening remarks let me thank you madam chair the successful development and implement implementation of the new computer system to manage the post nine eleven g i bill is vital to delivering accurate and timely education benefits not just for the chapter thirty three but for all of the education programs before we began i would like to echo i think some of the things that the chair chairlady just spoke in regard to again the three issues that they had some concern about in the muskogee about while they were there and meeting with managers and frontlines claims and call center workers the staff expressed their concern as was mentioned that the call center was closed to days a week to allow the workers to assist in processing education climbs while the staff ready are agreed that the diversion of some labor hours to processing claims they suggested that perhaps spreading those processing labor hours over the work week would allow the call center to remain open concern about you know maybe not those people not being empowered to perhaps you know being on the ground to actually determine you know what they feel like is best with integrate and as these things come up to respond and you know have some flexibility to solve these kind of problems the call center operates from seven to five central time with no one to answer calls coming outside those hours that means anyone living outside the continental us has a very limited window in which to contact the college and given the higher rights are blocked and dropped calls i think it's probably fair to them that if you're a beneficiary living in the pacific in european areas which there are very you know there's a bunch of people in that in that category i think they probably have you know hard the significant problem of getting assistance from cal center again i think that perhaps the  another thing that came up was that the the the the staff said that every call they take regarding the post nine eleven g i bill it's not uncommon at all to hear complaints about the difficulty in getting through to the to the call center and as i said earlier i think that in working those things out i do think that it would be  to everyone's benefit if the muskogee team had the flexibility to kind of adjust things depending on how things were going so that they could be as efficient as possible regardless closing the call center two days per week when there are a ton of vs claims production needs and provides customer service i think are out there at the same time so again that's something that you know that we need to perhaps talk about a latter day but we just of throw that out realizing and again you know it's sad that that as we have these kind of hearings you know we're talking about the negative things or things you know that we see that perhaps need to be improved on the other  hand you know very much compliment the people who are working really hard muskogee at the call center to to do the very best job that they can do i guess what i'm saying is is there something that we can do to helping year if you can look you know if there's things that we can do to improve that i think that would be very happy to assist you in doing that job thank you very much  bozeman i'd like to welcome our panelists testifying before the subcommittee today by joining us on our panel is mr mark kraus department of veterans affairs program manager space and naval warfare systems center atlantic and the honorable roger baker assistant secretary for information technology u s department of veterans affairs mr banquer baker is accompanied by mr jan frye deputy assistant secretary for the office of acquisition logistics and construction u s department of veteran affairs and mr keith wilson director of education service veterans benefit of ministration with the u s department veterans affairs gentlemen welcome we look forward to your testimony a sinister gracile start with you we welcome  and you're now recognized for five minutes good afternoon chairwoman her sister and one ranking member bozeman and members of the subcommittee i personally at the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the current status of the chapter thirty three long term solution my testimony will address the key milestones in dates current progress of the long term solution capabilities of the plan releases and project challenges which after thirty three long term solution came out on dates and milestones alos march thirty first two thousand and ten planned date for release one june thirtieth two thousand and ten planned date for release to september thirtieth two thousand and ten plan date for release three december thirty first two thousand and ten plan date for release for progress of the chapter thirty three long term solution during the four months since our last meeting with th subcommittee the chapter thirty three team is accomplished the following completed a rules based engine locating all chapter thirty three business rules in one area separate from the application logic consistent with service oriented architecture principle principles of stablish the development of production hosting capabilities in a secure cloud computing environment with secure network connections to be a legacy systems successfully integrated subject matter experts from the v a s field operations into development process to ensure the chapter thirty three long term solution application will best support the veterans claims examiners the c e s processing requirements and priorities completed a complex data interface with v a deity identity repository called beitar application our near term goals include deploying an early chapter thirty three long term solution release one point zero in march two thousand and ten to a limited number of the c e o s or claim examiners where original claims can be moved to and processed in the long term solution automated rules based environment explanation of the system being developed there are four veterans affairs regional processing offices responsible for processing thousands of claims from veterans seeking to use chapter thirty three educational benefits the adjudication process relies on highly trained c s or claim examiners to determine eligibility calculate entitlement to process the award this requires an interface multiple disjointed systems and perform significant manual entry the objective of the chapter thirty three long term solution is to support new legislative requirements of the web based tool that will provide automation and standardisation to the adjudication process this will significantly reduce the time to process a claim and the number of d c s require additional know ben if it will be efficiency accuracy predictability and reliable results additionally the tool will support the need for transparent data exchange and reporting while being flexible enough to adapt to future changes in policy and law the capability of the plan chapter thirty three long term solution are chapter thirty through really the long term solution release one point zero will be deployed to incorporate the core features necessary to process new claims to include tuitions payments housing allowances reenlistment incentives books and fees the primary objective of release one point will be  front end tool and job unable aim the claim examiners to completely migrate off the chapter thirty three interim solution release two point zero will expand the capabilities of the earlier release by enabling the c e o s are claim examiners to amanda wards and process transfer of entitlement claims release three point zero will improve claims processing efficiency by automating complex chapter thirty three financial transaction authorization process currently required to authorize payments for claims this will be achieved by establishing a system interface with  a s financial accounting system the feedback from releases one through three will determine the requirements and scope of relief for the challenges being overcome include translating the complexity of the chapter thirty three benefits into a business rules approach that will enable the system to quickly adapt to legislative interpretations changes in priorities number two it will access to the limited number of subject matter experts and claim adjudication process season policies systems training requirements and chapter thirty three long term solution team is currently developing a web based interactive train system to teach d c s how to use long term solution application process chapter thirty three claims the train system will include south korean material hands on processing of simulated chapter thirty three claims by the way compliant learning system to assess individual b c s progress and demonstrate competency using the l t s system classroom training materials to teach the r p r p o training coordinators how to administer the web based system to the claim examiner community and onsite support during the initial r p o deployment we are confident that the release of chapter thirty three long term solution will be completed by december thirty first two thousand and ten madam chairwoman this bozeman member bozeman and members of the subcommittee i appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today with my colleagues from both a war to discuss the status of the post nine eleven g i bill my testimony will address the current status of education claims steps taken to reduce the pending inventory and prepare for the spring and roman period and the status of the implementation of the post nine eleven g i bill long term solution since may first of two thousand and nine v a is received over one point five million claims for education benefits under all education programs and we processed approximately one point four million claims shoot over one point three billion dollars in post nine eleven g i bill benefits payments to approximately one hundred eighty thousand individuals and their educational institutions claims processing time frames have risen due to the increased workload from post nine eleven g i bill as we're all aware many veterans and or old school during the fall of two thousand and nine and countered unacceptable delays with respect to their receipt of their benefits i believe it's important to convey on behalf of secretary shinseki and every member of the v a team our apologies for those delays and our understanding of the impact that the impacts of those delays on veterans are unacceptable we believe we've identified and resolved the causes of many of those delays and that the results of the spring and roll month will be substantially improved over those of the fall while we continue to receive fall semester enrollment certifications even today there are currently under fifteen hundred volunteer almost certificates remaining to be completed with those remaining requiring further information from the student before they can be completed is taken numerous steps to reduce the number of pending claims to prepare for the spring and roman period detail a number of those steps in my written statement so i won't go over them here but as a result of those improvements have been able to increase his daily completions of chapter thirty three enrollment certificates from an average of eight hundred per day we experienced during october two thousand and nine to the nearly seven thousand per day or more we've been able to achieve during january a very substantial improvement as of january thirteenth the addressee post nine eleven g i bill spring enrollment for just over one hundred eleven thousand veterans of which eighty thousand had been processed we took aggressive actions to eliminate the backlog of fallen romance and were using all available resources to ensure veterans receive their education benefits from the spring term accurately and on time to help ensure that veterans who enroll in a spring term receive their benefits on time set a goal and one that we're confident that we can achieve to process any enrollment certification we nine technology delivered the third and final phase of the interim claims processing solution and that's the one we're using today to process which provides increased functionality and additional automation for processing post nine eleven g i bill claims this phase for vides of functionality for processing both amended awards and overlapping terms and i'm sure we'll have substantial discussion of what amended awards are here during this as a part of the complexity of the long term solution so moving to long term solution as you know we partnered with  develop an end claims processing solution to utilize rules based industry standard technologies and that is our long term strategy for implementing both the post nine eleven g i bill and other education claims processing as we move forward post nine eleven g i bill includes numerous eligibility entitlement criteria and kind of place benefits terminations that can best be made using rules based technology that requires minimal human intervention the automated system is a long term automated system a schedule be released in four phases release one is to replace the current functionality the interim solution and eliminate the need for extra job a external job a release two will provide an automated data feed for both claim and better information will provide automated data feeds into the v a financial processing systems and release for provide a veteran self service interface to view the status of planes were released one that remains scheduled for deployment on march thirty first of two thousand  this release has been changed to a limited pilot release which will deliver the ability to complete original claims and many other capabilities we plan to deploy release one to a limited set of plans processors to restrict the impact and training for the user community the expected release one to also include functionality for a number of items including amended awards the modification for the reduced functionality release one is caused by a substantially increased appreciation of the complexity of amended awards as a subject matter experts worked with the space or team new software requirements were identified and it became clear those requirements could not be incorporated into the march thirty first two thousand and ten milestone requirement under the program management accountability system that we introduced last june missing that milestone date would have substantial consequences and so we made a decision in conjunction with our customers to allow the delivery of reduced functionality in order to make a milestone date most importantly because this will be the first delivery of software for the long term solution i believe it's critical that real users begin to use this software for  production work because that's the only way we can assure ourselves that the software that's being delivered is an acceptable product and something we can rely on for the long term i don't mean to imply any doubt in the product as a software person i just am saying the only way i know exactly what i'm getting is when real users are using it and so i'm looking forward to that march thirty first twenty ten release and putting in front of real users will complete functionality for the subsequent releases as yet to be determined anticipates requirements releases two three and four the long term solution we still anticipate the successful delivery of all functional requirements for the long term solution by december of two thousand and ten and apparel in this concludes my statement i believe that mr wil now go through the powerpoint slides that you had asked us to prepare to address some of the direct questions good afternoon going directly to slide to the slides that we prepared provide amplification of the information that has been covered by mr kraus and mr baker slide  two talks about the specifics of the requirements that we have of the long term solar solution and by extension our spay warka partners obviously processing of the original and supplemental awards both claims from veterans as well as transfer of entitlement claims fry scholarship claims that cetera automated calculation of those awards and i would add to that not just automated calculation but automated processing as well it's one thing to do the manual calculations but another to pay the benefit as well retrieval of demographic and service information very importantly interfaces to our payment systems so that we can properly account for the money being expended and vitally important for many of our customers self service interface as well a web based self service interface allowing our customers to go online and retrieve a lot of the information that they currently have to call us or e mail us to to receive slide three talks specifically the release one of the long term solution and what is being delivered and what is not being delivered first of all on the left hand side the functionality that it's going to be provided does allow processing original post nine eleven g i bill coins it provides automated calculation of the payment awards the overlapping terms of intervals for amended awards etc it does not provide for automated processing it provides for automated calculation of the award amounts in those categories as well as also providing demographic information pulls information from vater which is our d o d data source on the right hand side the delayed functionality what we will not get is conversion of existing records in the interim solution into the long term solution we will not be able to process transfer of entitlement cases fry scholarship cases supplemental awards anything involving a kicker chapter thirty three kicker or supplemental kicker and claims containing amended awards and other words what release one is going to give us the capability of doing is processing any new original claim that comes to us that does not require any modification any individual whose claim we have already processed in the interim solution stays processed in the interim solution during release one so from a user perspective there's not a large category of cases that we will be able to work with release one but it does give us as mr baker indicated the ability to begin using the application itself and begin getting expertise on that the long term deployment schedule this has been talked about a little bit slide for provides a summary of the specific types of functionality we will get in each of the phases i've already talked about release  on a release to from a user perspective use release to give us us efficiencies that's the first point at which we're going to start gaining productivity and the reason is release to gives us the functionality of auto populating fields as well as auto calculation of award amounts so there will be a lot of replacement of the manual multiples system typing of information and that will be replaced by the automated data feeds that we will receive from the schools from the students when they enroll as well as automated d o d information coming into the system so  released to really is a game changer from a user point of view that that will give us some good efficiencies release three will provide that interface into our payment systems and from a user perspective what that means is that the process that we currently have in place that takes about two hundred people to complete the fiscal transactions the administrative work to actually get the payments out the door will be replaced by that phase that release three functionality and then release four will provide those user interfaces that i talked about they'll be a web based ability to go on and both self serve as well as to find out the status of for instance and romancer it's coming in from school students will be able to go online and find that information out directly slide five talks about the a future staffing the key message here i believe is that v a will be making determinations on how to gear down staffing based solely on the successful deployment of the functionality as you're aware we hired five hundred thirty additional people originally we augmented that with two hundred thirty additional people we have additional people brought in to fist transactions and other words the administrative transactions to pay the benefits we will begin reducing the workforce subject to the successful deployment of the long term solution beginning in fiscal year slide six provide some updated information concerning exactly where we're at with the spring involvement these are the same figures on this slide as mr baker mentioned in his testimony i do have updated information as of this morning   we have taken a lot of actions over the last many months as we've learned from our experiences in the fall term the bottom line is we have increased our staffing claims processing staff from approximately eight hundred individuals at the beginning beginning in the fall and roman to twelve hundred claims examiners currently that includes contract support for working some of our simpler non chapter thirty three claims redirecting two hundred or a hires from five different regional offices around the country implementing significant streamlining policy and procedures obviously providing the advanced pay mechanisms and continuing to utilize the  thank you slide seven in some ways talked again about the requirements of the long term solution the importance of the long term solution is its flexibility providing that self service functionality that students need providing the flexibility for a rules engine the wall allow us to quickly adapt to new changes in legislation payment rates etc and developing developing all of this in a service a service oriented architecture that well will be flexible as we continue to expand the system obviously what we're trying to do is minimize human intervention as much as   we'll be happy to take any questions thank you thank you all for your testimony let me start with a statement mr wilson changer from the user point of view for mr baker mr wilson i assume that the goal for the long term solution released two is to have that operational for processing fall twenty ten semester claims correct yes that's correct that being the case mr baker according to your testimony release one has been modified to reduce its functionality because of this new software requirement that you were recently  why did it take until just recently to to identify the need for the new software requirement actually what what occurred is as the subject matter experts on the software people were sitting down together to walk through what does  amended award really mean what are the intricacies of the decision trees wired for an amended award they kept on covering if you will more and more depth of what was required in the software and amended awards and it went  beyond the estimates they had originally had for what what it was going to take to do amended awards so as we determined that the amount of work required to make that march thirty first date exceeded the amount get everything in that was originally scheduled for release one and release one was intended to be the replacement for the current system so a functional replacement if we had delayed release one until about mid may we have had a fully functional release there's about that much additional work that was that was added so we know that will come in and we will be releasing that functionality in incremental pieces along the way to mid may and determines it's appropriate allowing the users to work with the increased functionality in that timeframe and then adding those automated feeds that are critical as we ramp up to june thirtieth so we have a reasonably good confidence in the june thirtieth and if you don't mind i'll elaborate on that just a little bit further saying that i have to tell you that pleased with the slip but i kno to sound a little strange that in december this project team was able to tell us that they had a problem with meeting the march thirty first date that's not a usual thing inside of a project usually you hear about it march thirtieth you know that's going to happen on march thirty first that gave us time to make rational decisions about do we want to allow the slip or do we want to force the delivery date so that we see the software and what is the impact of that on subsequent releases and so that's why we have a reasonable degree of confidence that we're going to have what we need on june thirtieth for a more automated system going into the fall semester that's exactly been our focus w june thirtieth release well i would just request that as that team you know you've got a lot of internal milestones you're trying to me and you've been very helpful to our committee and to our committee staff and sharing information at every step of this process but in light of the problems that we've had with the interim solution in light of the importance of this long term solution  we need to stay on top of this day by day week by week and if there is any other problem that is revealed to your project team we just need to be made aware  of some of that ongoing work because of the importance of these deadlines in meeting the benefits needs for the students and understanding what more you might need from us because it's a high priority  not only among the committee but the colleagues that we hear from who have student veterans that have experiencing problems and we want to make sure that we're able to answer questions immediately for them  which will lead to some of the other questions we're going to have about sort of what's happening this spring semester but we really we're close to ensure these targets are met we're ready to go in the fall so for an example when do when is the team able what's the target date to integrate them after the release after release i mean we just need that's an exe i just point if you can answer great but that's one thing i think we need to have functional requirements for what we needed in the long term solution at the beginning that has been laid down but when you look at those functional requirements in some ways it's like an onion you know what you've got in front of you but as you peel it back there's more and more inside so as the users are sitting down with the programmers and they're saying first of all they're saying we need to be able to account for interval pay they understand that but then as they get into that they have to understand what the mechanics are that are involved with and those discussions occur on a regular basis because of the agile development process they're constantly going around and around working on those things moving on to the next stage you can i think directly to your question i believe we have those detailed requirements now it was as we were putting those specifically down we determined that there was more there and they could be met from march thirty first but we know that short of what we call sprint additional sprints we'll get those done after the march thirty first and deliverable after the march thirty first date that's what we believe that all of those requirements that would have gone into the first release that we originally scheduled for march thirty first it's about mid may that they'll be able to have walked through all of those things and i'm going to look at carlson and see if i can make certain that we're saying that we're in agreement on this one yes ma'am a madam chair on the requirements of the bow wave or requirements that we saw in the beginning of december are going to be completed by june thirtieth and released to this is this is a good news story if we had done this a traditional way a waterfall way where you get all your requirements up front and you just are plugging away at the plan this would have been a two year slip one to two your slip having hundreds of requirement show up a few months before you get ready to deploy but that's not what we did we did we have an agile methodology we do two weeks branch and we were able to recover within within looks like we're going to do a three month functionality slip that's unheard of in a major software project so this is this is good a limited release is industry back to practice the big bang i know you've seen other examples of a big bang strategy with software releases that usually doesn't go very well so a limited release is a proven industry best practice will bring out the application will refine the production deployment processes and production support mechanisms and will be able to gauge a real world impact on the users of the data source is a legacy system so this is going to really be gotten a lot make the june thirtieth the point of release too much easier so this this is good good when stuff i think that these are limited releases the release one is a real limited release released all the release is limited release amrani release two will be to all the d c s if you will the veteran claim examiner release two will be  replacement of what we're using right now we will no longer be using the old interim solution we will be fully onto the new long term solution and will be a transition where the users will have to transition off that that may take a few weeks before you can just say ok turn off your accounting system folks the people to maintain an application have stepped up to the plate and said that interface belongs to us we're going to do the lion's share of that work and i have a lot of that request that question would have to be answered by someone that's doing the financial accounting system but but but they've stepped up to the plate we're partnering with them and i'm i don't know if they can increase the i don't i don't know the answer that question but i think we as a team can find that out but but let me give you a very direct answer to that this team has been highly accurate from my view and what they can tell me about what's going on one of the things that we're going to offer to do with your staff is start talking bringing them in and talking about the monthly project plans that we get they're very very good i would be very reticent to tell you that we can move functionality we've asked that several times in the past the answer is we're doing about what we can do to make this deliver the good news is as  as they're doing very short bursts of work verifying that and then moving on to to the next piece so much as all of us would like to move it up the other thing that i will tell you is that we will do that release on september thirtieth and make that available to education service to determine whether they want to install it one of the things as people we have to be sensitive to on the business side is what's the impact of installing a new release especially on a date like september thirtieth which is right in the middle of the peak for the fall semester and so we will at that point in time know all the training required all the benefits from a processing time they will gather all  intricacies of doing the change and be able to make a business decision does it make sense to install this on september thirtieth or does it make sense to put it in a different point in time and make all those things have to have to factor in right now given the fact that we've just experienced a reduction of functionality i really hate using the word slip but i think i'll go ahead and do it i wouldn't want to then try and say how do we do more how do we bring things you know back end up i'm focused on i think and i think everybody here sees that we're focused on march thirty first june thirtieth and december two thousand and ten you know those those to me are the hardest dates and they're the september date while important is is the one that i think we leave up to  to determine when they want to install it captain crash i'm a guy that i've got three daughters and they help me with my i tunes and get songs and legally not any other way but i guess what i'm saying is that you know i can text in this and that but technologically i'm a little bit challenged on the progress of the thirty three long term solution in your testimony the section of the progress or the milestone under the progress progress or essentially this is a question about the secure cloud computing environment and actually you're using a cloud right now if you have an e mail account with google or yahoo or one of the one of the email it or even your music that your daughters help you download you have to go to a cloud to get it the cloud essentially is maintained by the service provider and it's got the applications in the data and so in our case we've gone to a commercial provider where  where our applications and data will be stored and maintained and we don't really have to think or worry about the the end of the infrastructure that's not really our concern we rent that now we don't we lease that service we purchase a service from this from this commercial provider and it's a hosting service and so another way of explaining cloud computing it's an application hosting service instead of something we buy or maintain and so i it's very scalable and it's angele all you have to do worry about is connecting to the cloud you don't have to worry about the details inside the cloud so that's that's kind of a real simple way of disquiet this spreading cloud computing and in this particular case they've given us a segmented cloud of our own for the v a that specifically complies with the v a security requirements pays attention to prior personal identifiable information which is sensitive data like your social security number that you don't want to expose those kind of protections this cloud environment gives us in this situation maintained for us so that's that's the second bullet if i could i just need to put a point as the security had for for be any id we have we have sent the folks out and determine this is as secure as if we were processing it in one of our own data centers there's a lot of security around this so i want to assure people there's not an issue with that and mr baker i think has a final sign off on that that solution to so we will stay very close with him on getting briefed on the size of that and so you ask for the third bullet the just the first to the first two again the rules based engine is essentially an engine where you can input the rules and essentially is it automatically the software in the old way of thinking it would if you made a change to software you would have to go in and change all the code do regression testing test the whole application it could take several months if not years to do it in this and in this application the vision eventual is for mr wilson's folks to have access to the rules based engine and when he comes up with a rule they come out with a frye amendment or some other change is folks going to change go into the web change the rules and and it automatically is implemented in the software without having to go in and change the application code so that's kind of what service oriented architecture that's one of the benefits of service oriented architecture you can reuse code and you can go in and make changes on the fly that are immediately implemented so that's why we're that's why we're laying the foundation for this product on a solid base foundation which may be painful now but in the long run it will avoid the years of software changes that are that are not going to be required you will be able to do it very immediately thank you very much one one other thing and again this came up at the call center when the when the staff was down the call center they could go in and dig around you and figure out what was wrong and yet unless the the call came from the jurors stiction of the muskogee center they really couldn't fix the problem  o i guess you know what what we're asking is if that's really is or why perhaps you know for those very simple things that is there a way to do that you know without you know instead of fixing it then having to send a request to another center someplace and then that kind of stacking up there till i get does that make sense it doesn't make sense and in the short answer is yes that capability exists when we set up the national education call center we did staff the education call center with a certain number of veterans claims examiners to be able to address specifically those situations so i do have as a task or following this hearing to find out the specifics i need to provide a full answer but right now the education call center does have that capability i appreciate that like i said that that's that's a little thing but it  does seem like you know it might be something that might make things a little bit more efficient i think you're you're what you're going to do force mr baker in the sense of updating us periodically with your briefings i think that's really excellent and  i think when we were talking about the release juan versus released two and released two pretty much fully supplanting released one so how long do you anticipate it's going to take to train the veterans claims examiners in each of the releases done this before this space where folks have not trained before all the training now it's been done with inside of the so i don't know that we have a feel for that yet i think we will have a feel for that once we do the limited release i think we'll have a better feel for it  the things that i mentioned in page five of the testimony are things that are ongoing right now that i think i've you can go to the web and you can actually do your your training online and do simulated claims and if you have an onsite person to help you  think it i don't i don't know that we have an estimate to determine that the training that is going to be used for the long term solution is different than the way he would have trained people in the plant passed in that integrated into the application itself is self paced training modules so those individuals will be able to use the application itself to train it will have use cases etc in it so we would expect that to be a more efficient than gathering people together in classrooms preparing training material etc etc what i can tell you is the training for the interim solution the initial training for the interim solution was about forty hours per person about a work week per person we would expect this initial training to be something less than that but we don't have it exactly defined what that less would be at this point ok well that will be important to pull together and  cause a slip right in terms of again meeting the needs of the veterans when they need it as we get ready into the into foster master the reason for the june thirtieth release date is to make certain that we have plenty of time to do the training to make certain that people are really up to speed i mean clearly one of the issues in the fall was we had a brand new brand new law brand new system lots of new folks and bringing them up to speed was one of the one of the issues here they know the people are there they're trained they know the law they know the process know we won't have those issues but it but it is a new system and we know we're going to need training time this mr cross it sounds as you described it in terms of this kind of service and you know that there is a significant degree of flexibility so that if congress chooses to modify this benefit in any way that we've got a flexible system to work with don't have to start from scratch and we don't have an old legacy system and the restrictions that that imposes  on us to be able to make legislative changes to modify benefits and then can't meet the expectation of the delivery of those benefits so we want to make sure that it's flexible in the future and what you've described the flexibility it offers to set it up after the system's a stablished what happens i mean the relationship here continues or is the v a somehow going to have that in house technological expertise to go in and make some of the changes given the flexible of the system that mr grass you describe the system would provide and then what what v a going to be able to do that my opinion i think so the people that i've expect a transition you know i don't think any of us expect that on december thirty first it will be all the war on this because while it is rules based i think the best way to think of rules  is in between natural language and programming there is an area and we talk about training we're going to want to make certain that the semi's in the education service really understand what they're doing when they change those rules and so there will be support on that i'm sure you'd appreciate congress knew what we were doing when that's really what education is doing is reflecting congress as well so we want to make it easier  example going to work to share information because there are some very important pending bills some of which we've had a chance to discuss have hearings about that we already have found agreement to try to change and support but understood that we had to get to keep pace here to get the new benefit that's very complex under way but there will be changes made and so we want to make sure that we're sharing information we have an understanding so that when we do make those changes we're easing the path not complicating just to just to be very clear implementing a rules based engines is that every time there will be no programming it greatly increases the probability that we can change something without having six months and fifteen programmers to do that but given the range of things that congress might decide that it wants to do with a program i just want to spend the rest of our time a few more moments on the still pending claims for the fall semester of last year and the spring semester of two thousand and ten i know you gave us the updates here on the numbers here  mr baker i think you said there are fifteen hundred remaining claims for the fall two thousand and nine semester and that for the bulk of those more information is needed from the student kind of information we got to put the student has a responsibility of providing some information but is there any way in light of the fact that these are pending eligibility for last fall i mean there's nothing pending there that's not correct less than a thousand now on payment of payments i'm talking strictly about and rolled students individuals we know in rural are enrolled for the fall either the school or if it's due to the veteran the housing or books of books stipend had not gone out there could be information first of all every individual in this category has been contacted by a and we have been in contact with them to let them know specifically what's needed it could be information that is lacking concerning service vericut verification from department of defense it could be information from the schools it could be that the student did not fill out the required information on the application it's unfortunately it would be a case by case basis ific situation it could  be that the school is waiting to submit the enrollment information to us because the student may not have completed some kind of requirement at the school we'd be happy to look into it further but it's all i have right now is just broad categories of the situation we do need to look into it further you know i appreciate that everyone of them has been contacted but as you said i mean it's case by case if one is  service verification from d o d is that the student's responsibility no that would be our responsibility so you know again i think we need more information so we can  you've bumped up the number of claims examiners to deal with some of that some of these were related to the questions also that writing with regard to the personnel issues in terms of the temporary workers who are in a hold on when you start losing temporary employees et but i think the the mr baker you had said it went out to the schools a notification right that anything received by january nineteenth  without question if that's correct would be processed by february first yes right what's been the response from the school of the bar when did you get into significant number of enrollments or vacations after that letter was sent out a couple days i don't know that we've had enough time to determine the response from the letter what i can tell you is last week we received one hundred fifteen thousand and roman cert from schools so  we are beginning to get in that highest volume period we will probably top out the first week of february in terms of the volume of incoming work in the middle declined fairly rapidly from  you you've said to the schools of those hundred fifteen thousand that came in last week those are all in the process by february first yes ma'am everything that will occur february first if they're due payments on february first  i'm sorry i'm not i'm sure i had just one other thing real quick and this this refers back to the to the staff is that we need to keep them at home so that we won't like your work  difficult but when they were out there they requested a report detailing the workload and resources needed to meet the a strategic goals for the education programs through next september and i guess the question is when we might expect that report and that's important so that you know that we can accurately reflect as we do our views an estimate it's you know if we have that information we can try and figure you know what kind of resources we need to request to help you you know get the backlog worked out and again i think we can be helpful to you in that way but we have to we have to understand what's going on understood i can commit to you that we'll have an answer concerning when we'll have that information to you this week we're still working out some some i guess modeling for lack of a better term concerning what when the claims will be  we we feel as mr baker indicated very comfortable that we can meet the february first deadline that we put out once we get to that point and we believe we have achieved that then we can look at more effectively at the resource issues and address perhaps in the call center issues etc well again thank you guys for being here and we do appreciate you and your staff and all that you guys represent i know that you're working really very very hard and you know it's just everybody working together trying to sort this out giving you the resources that you need so that we can we've got a great great program but we've got to figure out how to thank you thank you both and i just have one question that i'll ask on behalf of both of us since we sent the v a a letter together november twelfth of last year we're just wondering if you could update us mr wilson  you've implemented any of the recommendations that mr both when i made it could you speak to that unfortunately i don't have the specifics here i'd be happy to provide it for the record if you can get back to just so we know which recommendations that you've acted on because these were made in light of the problems in the fall that we hope to avoid in spring and we thought we had some good ideas so let us know if you didn't implement some of these you know what the justification want to echo mr both and opening remarks with regard to the work done by the employees at the muskogee regional processing center and the education call center for their service to our nation's veterans and their dependents i know joe wilson will work with you in the work you'll do in this ruben to address some of of the issues that we've raised here earlier today but the v a s v a employees there they're strong commitments to our veterans is one that we all share in the subcommittee i know that the staff appreciated the opportunity to be there more recently and as mr both and said he's been there previously as well so we'll continue to work to make sure that these dedicated employees have the resources that they need that you have the