Members of Congress are calling on the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to take greater accountability for VA.gov’s recent technical problems that impacted the disability claims of thousands of veterans.
During a House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization oversight hearing on Sept. 26, Chairman Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., said that because of these recent bugs, “the VA is badly in need of independent oversight.”
“VA.gov has gaps, and veterans are falling into those gaps,” Rep. Rosendale said. “[Thousands] of veterans – that we know of – had been struggling with the VA.gov bugs to access their benefits. In some cases, these problems have been happening for years.”
Since online filing became available in 2011, the VA discovered that an estimated 56,000 veterans who filed a request to update their dependency status online did not have their claims successfully processed by VA.gov.
This means that the VA was likely delayed in adding or removing a dependent from the veterans’ accounts, which could have increased or decreased their monthly benefit payments.
Additionally, the VA recently identified and fixed a bug that had prevented an estimated 900 veterans from appealing their decisions online since July 27. Specifically, the VA.gov website would not load when some veterans tried to access the “notice of disagreement” form.
“I want to be very clear that despite the limited scope of these issues, we view these problems as unacceptable,” VA Chief Information Officer (CIO) Kurt DelBene told the subcommittee.
“We at the VA deeply apologize to the impacted veterans,” the CIO added. “We are working relentlessly to ensure no veteran is negatively impacted by these technical issues by ensuring veterans receive effective dates that respect their original submission timelines and forgiving any overpayment debts that may have been created due to the VA’s technical mistake.”
Moving forward, the department is conducting a full review of all VA.gov processing systems to prevent similar issues from happening in the future.
VA Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Charles Worthington told the committee that this review will help the VA to get a “real-time sense of the error rates” with all of the services that VA.gov integrates with to deliver services.
“Something that we learned as a result of this incident is that we did not have a fast enough ability to identify these issues as they occurred,” Worthington explained. “And that’s what we are really focused on with this first priority of getting better monitoring and observability set up.”
Despite the VA’s plans to examine the root causes of these technical issues, some subcommittee members called for greater employee accountability and potential firings.
“I think that people need to be held accountable and holding someone accountable is not just saying ‘you’re accountable.’ It is sanctions against someone that missed this, because in this case, 56,000 veterans are paying the price,” Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, said.
Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, agreed, questioning DelBene and Worthington why no one has been held responsible at the VA for what he called an “egregious act against 56,000 veterans.”
“I greatly appreciate what the VA does as a whole, but when you get down to the granular level, I think we have a problem with addressing the major issues and leadership and not being held accountable for things that they do or do not do in upholding their fiduciary responsibilities to veterans like myself,” Rep. Luttrell said. “My concern is that nobody’s holding you responsible for this.”
