By Terry Howell
Last week's Blog covered news reports warning that a huge backlog of GI Bill "work items," which includes applications and payment claims, is causing a delay in Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits of up to 10 weeks. This week the backlog grew nearly 11 percent to over 234,000. To their credit, the VA has processed over 140,000 "work items" overall. In addition, it appears that at least 13,000 veterans will soon begin receiving benefits, if they have not already.
Note: It takes approximately 1.5 hours for VA to process each Chapter 33 Post-9/11 GI Bill application.
In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, Post-9/11 GI Bill Applicants Wait for Colleges to Certify Enrollment, Department of Veterans Affairs Director of Education Services, Keith Wilson, responded to the question about delays by suggesting that school certifying officials were to blame, saying that to date the VA had received only 13,000 certifications from the schools. “We have no control over when a school official will submit that enrollment certificate to us,” added Mr. Wilson.
Needless to say this has triggered an angry response from veteran’s program administrators and school certifying officials nationwide, denying that they are the bottleneck in the process.
Many of the certifying officials interviewed, said they were shocked to read the article and felt they were being stabbed in the back. A school certifying official, who wished to remain unnamed, said “the quote that stressed me is the one where he said they had no control over when a school sent an enrollment in. We have it in writing that we were to hold certifications until July 7, 2009.”
Another certifying official pointed out that there is no logical reason for a school to purposely delay the process, “not only is it bad for the student; it is bad for the school.” He also questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Wilson’s claim of receiving only 13,000 certifications.
Teri Gravenmier, veterans program administrator for the University of Alaska Anchorage, addressed Mr. Wilson’s assertion by explaining that in addition to other duties – including providing counseling and support for veteran students – “school certifying officials must verify not only that the student is qualified and how many credits they are registered for, but also that the coursework applies to their degree plan.” By comparison, “VA processors have one task to perform - process Chapter 33 [Post-9/11 GI Bill] applications,” Gravenmier points out.
Since early August, school certifying officials have been reporting serious payment errors made by the VA, including underpayments made because the VA failed to update their own database when the rates increased in August, duplicate tuition and fees payments, payments sent to the wrong schools, and payments made without supporting data including the student names. School officials have been told by the VA that they would not make any corrections to the payment issues until “Phase 3,” slated begin sometime in October.
Many of these errors and delays are easily attributed to a newly hired, inexperienced VA workforce, an understandable learning curve, lack of technical support systems, complicated requirements, and a huge flood of claims. But, many find it unfair for the VA to blame the schools for delays while they continue to have issues that still need to be addressed at the VA level.
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