Veterans haven't received GI Bill benefits for months due to ongoing IT issues at VA

[Stonepounder]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/veterans-haven-t-receive-gi-bill-benefits-months-due-ongoing-n934696

Veterans haven't received GI Bill benefits for months due to ongoing IT issues at VA

The Department of Veterans Affairs is suffering from a series of information technology glitches that has caused GI Bill benefit payments covering education and housing to be delayed or ... never be delivered.

<snip>

There are many veterans ... across the country who are still waiting for VA to catch up with a backlog created after President Donald Trump signed the Forever GI Bill in 2017. The landmark piece of legislation greatly expanded benefits for veterans and their families, but it did not upgrade the VA's technical capabilities to account for those changes.

While it is unclear how many GI Bill recipients were affected by the delays, as of Nov. 8, more than 82,000 were still waiting for their housing payments with only weeks remaining in the school semester, according to the VA. Hundreds of thousands are believed to have been affected.

<snip>

And advocates are similarly concerned as it remains unclear if the VA will be able to catch up before January, or if it will be inundated with new requests next year and fall even further behind.

At the end of August, Veterans Benefits Administration had nearly 239,000 pending claims — 100,000 more than at the same point in 2017. As school began, thousands of students faced dire circumstances and some faced eviction, getting kicked out of school or taking on loan or credit card debt.

This makes me want to personally grab GOPers and smack the shit out of them. Evidently, "Thank you for your service" ranks right up the with "Our thoughts and prayers go out". These are our VETERANS that we are talking about. The GI Bill PROMISES certain benefits to veterans and because Congress didn't bother to allocate any money to update the programs that send out the checks when they changed the law, thousand of vets who decided to go to college on the GI Bill are facing ending up as homeless, losing their possessions, and being kicked out of college because their checks aren't arriving, with no idea when the checks will start again.

Maybe we need a 'computer glitch' to 'forget' to send Congresscritters their checks.

(Pardon any misspellings or strange construction in my above comments. I am so angry that I am almost shaking. And I'm not even a veteran!)

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. Isn't the VA run by Trump cronies from Mar-a-Lago?

Lets find out what Trumps skim is. Dis-fucking-disgusting.

[Stonepounder]

2. Like I said, when I wrote my comments I was shaking with rage.

Last edited Fri Nov 16, 2018, 02:48 AM - Edit history (1)

Trump signed the bill, but it was Congress who passed it. The big change was that instead of using a Veteran's address, they would use the zip code of the college (s)he was attending. As someone who worked as a programmer for a number of years, I can tell you, this is NOT a minor change to an antiquated program, and there was no money allocated for the IT upgrade.

The article, which is not behind a paywall goes into much more detail. Much as I hate tRump, I don't think we can really hang this one on him, but rather the GOP Congress. Of course the fact that the VA hasn't had an IT Director since tRump became pResident doesn't help.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

5. Teflon Don is planning to "privatize" the VA! (S)he has already insulted active duty and veterans

After Teflon Don Trump and [or Xi, pronounced "Shee] discontinues reasonable benefits to dangerous people, suffering from PTSD and trained to kill, can he or she pay for that mistake? How?

[Haggis for Breakfast]

3. Time to hit the phones, people.

[allgood33]

4. Media fails to call Trump admin "incompetent" as they did Obama admin over the ACA.

Yes, sometimes the media is so transparent in their biased coverage.

[Cha]

7. I mentioned the same..

[Cha]

6. How are they surviving?!

If this were in the Obama Admin(which it wouldn't be) the M$M would be screaming night and day.. especially foxsux.

They screamed about mustard and tan suits.