good afternoon ladies and gentlemen the committee on veterans affairs subcommittee on economic opportunity oversight hearing on the status report on the post nine eleven g i bill will come to order i would like to state that the iraq and afghanistan veterans of america investigation and also joining us maybe congressman dick snyder of arkansas which are the armed services committee subcommittee on oversight and investigations both distinguished gentlemen are members of the full committee at some point as well today we see to administer our oversight jurisdiction on the v a s implementation and their implementation of the post nine eleven g i bill i expect that this hearing will provide  the opportunity to update us on recent actions taken to address delays in the distribution of education benefits and its plan moving forward to ensure that same mistakes don't occur in the future to date our main focus has been to ensure v a has the resources to upgrade its information technology to support the unique demands of the post nine eleven g i bill furthermore we have actively requested the v a appropriately alert us of any shortfalls in resources to successfully complete its mission to include legislative changes that must be made by this subcommittee and today we're seeking assurances that the v a has sufficient resources to meet all of its goals and demand placed upon it by public law one ten to fifty good afternoon ranking member and other members of the committee i appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the status of the post nine eleven g i bill implementation my testimony will address the gave approximately fourteen months to develop a highly complex system to ensure eligibility and payments are made for hundreds of thousands of claimants who would be eligible to receive benefits under the new program beginning august first of two thousand  to meet this challenge v a began accepting applications to determine eligibility to the benefit on may first of two thousand and nine on july sixth two thousand and nine we started accepting enrollment certifications from schools and began processing claims for payment the first payments were dispersed by the us treasury on august third two thousand and nine since may first of two thousand and nine approximately two hundred seventy five thousand individuals have applied for eligibility under the post nine eleven g i bill two hundred thirteen thousand individuals have been deemed eligible and provided a certificate of eligibility of the estimated eighty two thousand five hundred enrolled students approximately fifty two thousand five hundred have received payments under the post nine eleven g i bill during the same time paid benefits to over one hundred sixty thousand additional veterans under other education programs additionally paid fifty two thousand veterans hundreds of newly implemented advanced payment process veterans have experienced both good service and poor we believe our efforts to implement this program and our responses to the challenges we have experienced on sure that the post nine eleven g i bill will live up to its promise post nine eleven g i bill claims currently require manual processing using four separate systems that do not interface with each other when an application or enrollment certification is received the documents are captured into the image man and management system tam's the documents are out of electronically to a claims examiner or process the claims examiner reviews payment rates for students however the f c t has limited capability for processing multiple scenarios encountered in determining eligibility entitlement under the new program as a result in conjunction with modern corporation developed multiple jobs or out of system tools and spreadsheets to augment claims processing once the benefit right and payment amounts are determined the claims examiner manually enters the payment information into the back end tool separately for each payment required to be utilized as the existing benefits delivery network to issue payment a payment cannot be processed until at least two individuals approve the award and payment amount of all evidence to support the award action taken by the claims examiner and a senior claims examiner is captured for record purposes and tens this payment authorization process is completely separated for the housing allowance situation and fee payment and the books and supplies payment and all action is complete the claims examiner manually transcribe the most information into an award letter that is sent to the student providing them important information about their benefit due to lack of integration among the systems the time to process post nine eleven g i bill claim is significantly longer than processing time for other education benefits currently it takes approximately an hour and a half to process one original point i'm on to the post nine eleven g i bill face three of the interim solution provides will provide an increase functionality and additional automation for processing post nine eleven g i bill claims was originally scheduled for deployment in september two thousand nine to the complexity involved in processing both amended awards and overlapping terms three is now scheduled for deployment in early november of two thousand and processing under our education programs increased by one hundred eighty thousand claims over the same period last year due to the significant part to the large number of requests for certificates of eligibility under the post nine eleven g i bill and that increase in students is approximately seventy thousand the majority of students would transfer from the mcgovern bill and reserve educational assistance programs to the post nine eleven g i bill during the beginning of the fall two thousand and roman period however that has not happened instead we have seen a slight decrease in the number of students receiving benefits under the montgomery g i bill and rate compared to the same period last year we also expected the majority of veterans applying for the certificate of eligibility for the post nine eleven g i bill over the summer would start school during the fall of the roman period instead many may have applied for the new program to receive an eligibility determination but will enroll in the school at some point in the future in order other initiatives as outlined in my written testimony regardless we are not serving veterans timely in all cases in response the secretary authorized issuance of advance payment to students and rolled in school would not receive their benefits on october second two thousand and nine v a began issuing advance payments to students in the amount of up to three thousand dollars per individual in the first week be made advance payments to over forty thousand students total type of claims they are and we didn't do a good job of focusing on the number of individuals that were paying benefits and unfortunately we didn't do a good job of educating people on what the differences are a claim program knowing we didn't have the time to implement a fully automated system we stood up an effort to put in place the minimal that we needed to get checked out the door concurrently with that we have had a process going from the beginning  develop a fully automated system that will have full deployment currently scheduled for december twenty first scheduled deployment of that long term solution is scheduled for march april timeframe and ten that will eventually replace what is currently being called the front end tool on the job so there is not a huge amount of additional functionality but it will make the claims examiners lives a lot easier by consolidating and everything a more friendly user interface a web based tool but ultimately we do have that initiative to go to an automated mechanism to process this you know we've had a problem with i believe have a better process in place to make sure that we're communicating more effectively on that the issues that we're dealing with was trying to make sure we had something out the gate and informed our student population prior to ten to around the ten one timeframe the ten one was important because most folks were at that point where they were due their first full housing allowance payment so we thought is it important to get something up as soon as possible we were dealing  continue to deal at the time of that press release with some technical issues concerning how we get to the other locations beyond our fifty seven regional offices we very early on wanted a desire to spread out as much as possible we felt that the most effective manner of doing that was leveraging technology taking into account that we've got students at thousands of locations across the country we felt the most effective way of getting those he advance payment issue has been troubling we have had in our outreach material going back to the winter period or early spring winter period  information providing the student experience in other words what would a student experience and we have worked very hard to make sure individuals understand when they would be the examples that we used for the individual who would be to having their first day of class or the end of august come september first they were only eligible for a partial housing allowance for the couple days of attendance in september followed by the first full housing allowance payment on october first  but we didn't get that word out to everybody and there were pockets of communication and we need to continue to work hard on that issue you know and that brought up another thing there with the transfer in from the montgomery g i bill to the post nine eleven g i bill and sometimes  before they understand the full benefits of both programs people have committed to the post nine eleven g i bill and then found out that it really didn't have as many benefits for them individually as the montgomery g i bill but they can switch back is there anything that we can do there where they can reconsider it through oversight on their part or misinformation they want to go back to the montgomeryvill problem timeline that we provided to the subcommittee i believe was largely met in terms of our ability to generate payments on the date that we were required to deliver the first check f increased applications for eligibility determinations that did not translate into the student population dropping off other programs so we had significantly more work in our existing programs than we would have expected to have to maintain going into the fall in rome and one of the other primary challenges that we have responded to is when we began our ability to use the tools that were developed  implement program and assure short term may first when we began using those tools and it was very clear to us from the get go that even accounting for our understanding that they want  it has been our desire from the get go to make sure that the subcommittee has been informed all along if we did not meet those expectations then we need to be held accountable for that we provided information that part of my response would be speculation on mark for my part because i can't speak on behalf of the vendors having said that what i do know is that there appeared to be concerned with the timetable example an individual may make the decision now that they are better off under the post nine eleven g i bill monetary and that's a sound decision from their perspective however if they opt into the post nine eleven g i bill even if they would because they have five additional years to use the benefit even that is dynamic a person could be very comfortable in their threatened and they become more concerned and that's a factor concerning the benefit that is best for them now so that's why we've tried to focus on the monetary aspects that take into account the non monetary ok thank you very much thank you madam chair mr wilson as staff and as we've been out about it seems like that there's not a lot of knowledge about title fo currently we don't have significant efforts in that area and i believe that's a point well taken i believe we can do better in that area we do know right now there is information showing that about half of our student veteran population are in receipt of pell grants specifically pell grant a subset of the title for benefits you talk about so we can i believe do a better job of making sure folks understand the federal benefits that  universe of benefits out there and we have had discussions on how we do a better job of doing the and i guess maybe the working with the top program not be an area that you know that might be beneficial yes we had discussions with the state approving agencies on this very topic and we have had some preliminary back and forth concerning how we plug into the state mechanism how do we make sure that we are doing what we can to link up veterans with that state information i think the state approving a the ideal mechanism to do just that the current term employees go through you know the next enrollment period do we need to hire additional staff beyond what we've done on this last over the five hundred thirty additional people that we brought in and under the post nine eleven g i bill claims processing work that's part of a dynamic effort we are looking at those efforts every day we are going to continue to do that as we identify resources that we can bring to bear on this effort and we will be doing that  for processing do we have any idea when that will be available the first deployment the long term will be in the march april timeframe of two thousand and ten and what that will do is tremendous benefit for our veterans and certainly i know my commitment i know the committee commitment here to help you all we can thank the key to that issue just letting you know what we need to do i know that we're going to try and go forward my understanding is with the technical corrections of the bill to make things easier but but i do appreciate your hard work and appreciate your hard work i think that they are doing the very best th everything that we're putting in place right now is designed to ensure that we go into the spring semester fully loaded with what we need to have on board we will take every step that we need to to make sure veterans have access to payment if that means that we have to keep in a payment mechanism of some sort in process we will do that but our goal is to make sure that those mechanisms are not needed that we have this issue resolved prior to the semester and we move forward the secretary has been very clear that any delay in payment is an acceptable everybody and agrees wholeheartedly with that on a personal level i can say firsthand i know exactly what the students are going through i went through college under the g i bill i know what it's like to stand in line for food after defending this nation i take this very personal and we're going to fix it we what we want to get that down to ultimately what we would like to see in the long term solution is essentially that's why we're going to a rules based mechanism which we can do  rules based system we're going to continue to work toward the point where we have everything processed automated one thing i would remind the members is we're talking about post nine eleven g i bill  chairwoman director i thank you so much for the passion in which you discussed your your your past experience your personal experience and i'm like i'm so optimistic you'll continue to bring that level of passion to meet the needs of our people mustering out of service and trying to transition successfully to a civilian life through education or anything any other tool you need from congress to achieve this goal of a post nine eleven g i bill the main tool we need is the ability to continue an aggressive dialogue with congress we are anxious to engage with congress as we have continued that expand that we want to streamline this as much as possible while making sure that we don't do anything that we don't want to do in terms of interrupting the level of service that we have now we do have limited flexibility concerning what we can do with our existing structure but the main there are other folks working to who don't like to come here for dialogue because sometimes it's in a less pleasant environment less pleasant context than we're discussing today in terms of meeting needs of folks who are trying to achieve their goals through education so please we welcome a dialogue proactively on a couple of final question with regard to the education call center we have received some calls to the committee from veterans who are frustrated in terms of their inability to reach a able to call the data to tell us how long the average wait time has been for veterans what the drop off or a percentage is and how long will these resources be available to the fifty seven term personnel and  for you to consider as to be a move forward with the implementation of all the education programs and again we will continue to work closely with you as it relates to your goals and objectives for implementing the long term solution for the post  for our veterans and access to important benefits based on the feedback that we received from a number of veterans we think that the v a should consider the following informing veterans of the importance of submitting an application of eligibility early allowing the v enough time to process the claim before the semester began asking veterans if they plan on using their education benefits in the upcoming term during that application process it's my understanding that the v a doesn't ask that simple question that i think would allow the v a officials to prioritize the processing of the certifications of eligibility also informing veterans to expect to receive their first thing in books i've been in arrears maybe we seek to change that but until we do given that it's administered the same way it was under the other education planes benefit knowing that there was some information or misinformation or miscommunication in some of the outreach effort that different organizations in the v a were doing there was an expectation that wasn't effectively manage there so i do think that we in till it changes made have to inform veterans more effectively on what to expect as it relates to receiving those housing books  informing veterans of the benefits to applying for additional federal education programs are going to be education benefits and i would encourage you to let us know or to coordinate with and understand for us to understand the role of the state approving agencies in assisting in that regard other veteran service or service organizations that can help communicate all of the opportunities available to our veterans especially the federal pell grant program and the federal work study program may provide a source of es resources to implement some of these recommendations to ensure that student veterans don't experience the same barriers that the first wave of students recently encountered again i think given all that you did anticipate some of which you didn't anticipate i do have confidence that we all will apply lessons learned to address those going into the next semester the following and then the long term the deployment the long term solution but i do think that this authorization to conduct mass media outreach services and again getting ideas for its effectiveness working with working with our what would be very helpful so i hope that you'll play serious consideration on these recommendations that don't require congressional intervention and i along with my colleagues in the committee stand ready to assist the administration the president the secretary and you as you see to eliminate delays in processing the education benefits for our nation