Posts Tagged ‘Department of Veteran Affairs’

Patience and persistence required

The title of this post sums up two of the most important tools one must have when dealing with the Department of Veteran Affairs. Filing a claim, to any of the VA’s many departments, is a daunting task. Translating the form-letter responses the VA sends once your claim is received requires mastery of the foreign language spoken by the department. For many veterans, this is too much to handle on their own.

After reading several of the comments on my Post-9/11 GI Bill saga post, I decided a post was necessary to provide some sort of advice to my brothers and sisters at arms. The sort of advice that might give veterans a glimmer of hope in the dark cave that is waiting for the VA to process a claim. The sort of advice nobody gives you when you separate from the service, or decide to file your first claim with the VA.

Rule #1 – Be patient.

We all want our benefits, and we all want them now. That simply is not going to happen, and pacing back and forth hoping tomorrow is the day you get your money is only going to stress you out. If you are like me, you already carry too much stress from your time in the service. Do yourself a favor, and roll with the punches. Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the grease – so squeak on, but do not expect same-day action from the VA.

Rule #2 – Be persistent, and proactive.

You will get mountains of mail from the VA. Most of it has nothing to do with anything. Some of it is crucial to your claim. That means you’re going to have to read it all. Buy a shredder, as most of it belongs there. When the VA makes contact with you, make contact back with them immediately if there are any discrepancies whatsoever. If there is something that does not add up, tell the VA it does not add up. Keep telling them until you receive official notice, that would be more mail if you’re wondering, from the VA that there was a problem on their end and they are correcting it. Never take a “we will take care of this right away” over the phone as resolution. Just like in the service, if it is not on paper it never happened.

Rule #3 – Get assistance.

Whether this is your first claim, or your fifteenth claim, an extra set of eyes is invaluable. Any mistake, no matter how small, will likely result in your claim being delayed even longer and ultimately denied. Many veteran service organizations exist, and most of them have workers dedicated to helping veterans file claims. I am a Life Member of Veterans of Foreign Wars and a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Both of these organizations can provide important information on filing your claim, and drum up support for you while you fight for approval of your claim. Though you may feel alone, know that you are not.

Rule #4 – Be prepared.

As I said earlier, if it is not on paper it never happened. Hopefully, you kept copies of everything your branch of service ever gave you. That is, if you were lucky enough to get a copy for yourself in the first place. Your official records will be the first thing that is checked. The probability your file is incomplete is about the same as the probability that the sun rises in the east tomorrow.

As an example, my medical records cease to exist past October, 2006. I was not released from active duty until July, 2008. The only award in my OMPF? Parachutist badge. Nothing else made it into my file. Fortunately, I have copies of all but my medical records (since the Army refused to release them to me while I was active, and then refused to release them to me upon separation).

If you do not have your records, do whatever you can to get them. Assuming that fails, as it did with the second half of my medical records, find someone who was there with you. Have them write you "buddy letters" for incidents they witnessed or of which they had direct knowledge. Remember, unless your buddy happened to be the diagnosing physician they need to stick to comments that are strictly within their area of expertise. An infantry friend cannot write that an IED detonation gave you TBI. He is not a medical professional. What he can say, is that an IED detonated on your patrol, he saw you get hit in the head and experience a loss of consciousness for however many minutes. Buddy letters are to establish that an event did in fact occur, and was related to your service. Nothing more.

Rule #5 – Make Congress work for you.

Know who your district representative is, know who your senators are. Have their contact information easily accessible, for both local and Washington D.C. offices. When you file a claim, go ahead and start writing a congressional inquiry. I keep an open file on my computer with the details of any claim I have going. If it becomes clear that the VA simply is not working on my claim, which happens, I print that file, scan it, and email it to the local office of my representative for congressional action. As I said above, if it is not on paper it never happened. This includes your VA claims. You need to keep copies of them, and when you’re filing a congressional you should send everything to them.

Once Congress is involved, you will get some sort of response. Refer again to rule number one, be patient. The response you get may not tell you a single thing you did not already know, but it forces someone at the VA to actually touch your file. Usually, this means it gets worked on shortly thereafter and you get some sort of resolution to your problems. This also establishes a paper trail, and takes away anyone’s ability to claim you never asked for information.

Rule #6 – Use the Internet.

This last one should be a no-brainer, considering it is 2010. When I say to use the internet, I do not mean head to Google and search for forms you need to fill out. While that is one good use of the internet, you have bigger fish to fry.

Consider the following, the VA has shifted some attention to “new media” and now has it’s ear to the ground listening to the buzz on Twitter and blogs. My Post-9/11 GI Bill saga post is ultimately what got my Ch33 claim finalized for Fall 2009. I shared it on my Twitter account, it was retweeted (echoed) by several other veterans online (to include IAVA’s Paul Rieckhoff) and ultimately the VA responded from their accounts.

Twitter is free. Blogs are free. You probably already have a Facebook account. All of these can serve to get your case noticed, and resolved. You just have to use them together, and keep at it. Remember what I said about the squeaky wheel getting the grease? Get your squeaks amplified by the internet and you might get a shiny new set of wheel bearings.

If anyone else has suggestions I left out, feel free to leave them as comments. I’ll add them to the body of the post. Never give up, and never accept defeat. If you earned an honorable discharge, you held up your end of the deal. Do not let the government back out of their end.

Unresolved, the Post-9/11 GI Bill saga (Updated, x3. Scroll down – issue resolved!)

Somewhere on the fringe of your memory, you may recall a post I made about the utter failure of the Department of Veteran Affairs to competently roll out the Post-9/11 GI BIll. My story is not unique in any way. My story is shared by, literally, hundreds of thousands of veterans of our ongoing armed conflicts. Veterans who promised something to their country, and upheld that promise. A promise, in the form of the Post-9/11 GI Bill (Ch33 hereafter), was made to us and has not been honored to a degree anyone could consider acceptable.

Four months. That is how long it took the VA to figure out I was eligible for Ch33. Keep in mind I had already been in the VA’s system for education benefits for a year under the Montgomery GI Bill, and am also in the VA’s system for disability and compensation. The requirements for Ch33 eligibility are simply not that hard to vet, especially not for veterans of an active-duty component. Did the veteran have 36 or more months of continuous active-duty service after September 11, 2001, and receive an honorable discharge? One sheet of paper contains all of this information, and the VA has this sheet of paper with my name on it in at least triplicate. Even the laziest of unskilled work could make it through literally thousands of these claims in a single day if motivated by a bacon double-cheeseburger. I will stop trying to understand how the VA failed to do this, because it defies all logic and I’m not sure even Socrates could come up with an explanation.

Roughly two more months have passed, and my Fall 2009 claim is still incomplete. When the VA found someone able to muster the will to read my DD214 and determine that my honorable discharge after 4 years, 11 months, and 26 days of continuous active-duty service did in fact mean I was eligible for Ch33, they fumbled the ball again. The University of Houston submitted my tuition and fees to the VA correctly, the VA turned around and certified me for a full $1000 less than I was owed. Immediately, I contacted the VA and informed them of their mistake. As far as they were concerned, it must have been my mistake. I got the school to call, and explain exactly what the mistake was and the VA agreed with them. “We will get this fixed,” they said. My account summary at UH still shows a $1000 debt owed. I have already taken half of my finals, and registered for Spring 2010 courses.

If you think that is pitiful, hold on to your chair, it gets worse. Remember the $3000 emergency advance payment the VA so graciously offered when they had veterans dropping out of college, because of the mountains of debt they built up, because the VA failed to deliver BAH payments as promised? I took one of these checks and was informed shortly thereafter the debt would be settled by withholding BAH payments when my claim was finally processed. When I finally got my money in early November, there was $3000 too much money. In early December, I got a full BAH payment for the month of November. The VA still isn’t withholding the money. That’s great, right? Free money! All my problems are, surely, gone! Wrong. Even if the overpayment is entirely the fault of the VA, you will pay it back. This has happened to me before. I have no desire to deal with the same sort of insanity again; I put away $3000 somewhere I wouldn’t touch it until either the VA withholds from my future BAH payments, or sends me a another debt-collection notice. Fool me once…

A contact within the Department of Veteran Affairs got me this response to an inquiry about settling the debt from the GI Bill head-honcho Keith Wilson:

“VA is currently developing the process to collect the amount of advance payments received. When the process is developed, VA will provide notification to all students that received an advance payment to ensure they understand the process and their questions are answered.”

If anyone else feels like that is the non-answer of the century, I am glad I have company. Why call veterans, and explain to them that the debt would be settled by withholding from BAH payments if that was not actually the plan?

As the semester draws to an end, I cannot say I look forward to Spring 2010. Allegedly, claims have yet to begin processing for the new semester and that is just another disaster waiting to happen. Ch33 was meant to afford veterans of our most recent wars the ability to go to school and focus only on school. We would not need to work, because we would get a housing allowance. We would not need to worry about how many hours we were taking, because our tuition and fees would be covered. Instead, we were not paid either on time. Instead, fighting to get what we were owed before we had to drop out, or risk drowning in a pool of debt, became a full-time job that robbed us of many hours that could have been spent studying.

This has been said many times, but is worth repeating again. Failing to plan, is planning to fail. The VA failed to plan, and failed us all.

For more information on the Post-9/11 GI Bill, and some of the ways you can fight back against the VA when they fail to do their jobs, go visit newgibill.org.

Update:
Finals are over, my grades have been posted, and the VA has still not paid for their $1000 mistake in my fees. I have tried to call, every single day, for several days and still cannot get anyone on the phone at the VA. This is absolutely maddening. I shudder to think of how the veterans even less fortunate than myself are taking things, especially this close to Christmas.

People ask me what I want for Christmas. Now I know. Give me a competently run GI Bill, and an effective Department of Veteran Affairs. That is all I want, and it will last me a lifetime.

Update #2:
Christmas has come and gone, and I had a good one. What I did not have, however, was resolution of my ongoing issues with the VA. In fact, things have become even more interesting.

The VA apparently uses Twitter now. Personally, I think they might want to master the technology they already use before they branch out too far into social media. Below is what the VA sent me regarding one of my tweets about underpayment of fees.

From @VAVetBenefits: @anthonymartinez Check w/ your certifying official to see what amounts your school submitted to VA for payment as that is what we pay.

Is that so? I have two documents, which I have scanned (with my personal information redacted) and uploaded here, proving otherwise. In addition to those documents, the VA’s own question system has an open and unresolved entry under my account about the underpayment of my fees started by a VA employee. Since a picture is worth 1000 words, and I have already exceeded 1000 words in this post, look below (click the photo for a larger view). I got lazy with my redaction of personal information, but note the areas highlighted by neon-green arrows.

VA fail

VA Fail

Update #3 – Resolved

From @VAVetBenefits: @anthonymartinez Resolved. Thanks for the info and good luck!

This tweet appeared on my TweetDeck on December 30, 2009. Last night, on my way to my younger brother’s wedding, I got mail from the VA office in Muskogee dated December 29, 2009, that acknowledged the underpayment and informed me they had sent the appropriate $1000 payment to my university.

Big thanks to @DeptVetAffairs and @VAVetBenefits on Twitter for working hard to get my issue resolved. Without them, I’m not sure I’d have ever been paid. Another thanks goes out to Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afganistan Veterans of America for his retweets of my updates here on the blog and the work his organization does to help other veterans in positions even worse than my own.

My experience with the VA’s exercise in failure.

During my second tour in Iraq, with the 3rd Brigade 3rd Infantry Division, several of my friends and I closely followed the development of a new and improved GI Bill for veterans of the Global War on Terrorism. Even early on in the drafting of the bill to overhaul the GI Bill, into something more like the benefits package enjoyed by veterans of WW2, details looked very promising. Promising enough to make leaving active duty as a non-commissioned officer, even when faced with enlistment bonuses in excess of $50,000, to finish a college education a very appealing prospect.

When the bill was signed into law, in July 2008, I was camping with my parents in Zion National Park and enjoying my terminal leave. My phone, which had not seen even a single bar of signal in many hours, rang loudly as one of my old Army buddies called to give me the news and details of the GI Bill that would supposedly make our goals in higher education much easier to achieve. Both of us were skeptical of how well things would work once actually implemented, as we were both stop-lossed and well understood the unparalleled ability of our government to drop the ball on its end of a deal.

Dropping the ball is about the most polite way to phrase the epic failure that is the Department of Veteran Affairs’ handling of the entire Post-9/11 GI Bill (Ch. 33) system. There were 10 months between the signing of the bill into law, and the opening of the application process for Ch. 33 benefits, and more than a full year before the first payments would roll out. Somehow, even with that much time, the VA was unable to coordinate with the states and institutes of higher learning to have things ready for Fall 2009.

As soon as the application process opened I submitted the appropriate paperwork to both change schools and programs. Four short days passed before I received one of the coveted certificates of eligibility for my new school, and new major. I was informed that the election of Ch. 33 would be processed at a later date. That date was roughly four and a half months later. Nearly a solid three months into the semester. A solid three months during which I had to dig quite the debt-filled hole because I did not have the housing allowance I was promised, nor did I have the book and supplies stipend I was promised, nor were my tuition and fees paid.

My case is far from the only of its kind. More than 100,000 veterans are in the same, rapidly sinking, boat. To address this, the VA issued emergency $3,000 “advance payment” checks at Regional VA Offices around the nation to veterans that could produce a few simple pieces of documentation. I went and took advantage of the $3,000 check, even though it fails to cover even the housing money they owe me. What can I say, I was very close to being unable to pay any of my bills. Electing to beat back the possibility of ruining my otherwise excellent credit score, I used that money to pay off some of the ~$6,000 in personal debt I was forced to take on by the VA dropping the ball. That decision was hedged on a bet that the VA could not possibly take another full month to pay my tuition.

Now, with full disclosure in mind, there were circumstances surrounding my specific claim that quite likely threw an extra kink in the pipes. I was overpaid for the Spring 2009 semester, and filed for a waiver (which was promptly denied). This, as it well should, definitely caused a backup on the payment end of the deal. However, I paid what the VA claimed I owed them immediately upon receiving my denial letter. Ironically, when I called to make that payment the VA was unaware they had denied my claim. Apparently postal mail moves faster then their computer system. We will ignore the fact that the ~$900 I owed the VA for their overpayment amounts to roughly one third of the amount they owed me for tuition alone, and will certainly not imply that it would have been incredibly simple to deduct the overpayment from what the VA owes me in housing allowance money.

What the above circumstances do not explain is how on Earth it took the VA four and a half months to determine that a veteran with 4 years, 11 months, and 26 days of continuous active duty military service beginning in March of 2003 was eligible for Ch. 33 benefits. Glancing at my DD214, a document the VA certainly has available, in at least triplicate, would quickly reveal to anyone able to read that I do in fact have more than the required 36 months of post-9/11 service to qualify for Ch. 33.

Fast forward to this very day. In the mail was a wonderful letter, dated 21-Oct-2009, from the VA informing me that I was 100% eligible for Ch. 33! Thing were looking up, until I read how much the VA sent (none of which has made it to The University of Houston, or my bank account). People that know me are well aware that I take a hands-on approach to pretty much everything, and will know I am serious when I say I was literally standing next to the kind VA lady at UofH when she typed in and submitted the balance the VA owed for my account. Here is an image to illustrate the breakdown:

Breakdown of my tuition and fees at the University of Houston for the Fall 2009 semester

Breakdown of my tuition and fees at the University of Houston for the Fall 2009 semester

Those numbers add up to $2,599.15. This is the balance my account summary shows due at UofH, and the amount the VA owes for this semester. The amount for which they claim to have sent in payment? $1,599.15. Interesting, right? My best guess is that someone cannot type, and instead of entering $1,153.55 for my fees typed in $153.55. No big deal, just a grand right? Wrong. Like many people in today’s economy I cannot simply will an extra $1,000 into my wallet. Taking the above mess into consideration, I would be insane not to worry that the emergency loan I took to pay my tuition will not be paid on time. After all, it took four and a half months for the VA to figure out I was eligible. Since it only took me about 32 seconds to figure out how the VA miscalculated what they owed me, my guess is that it takes them roughly 4 months to come to the same conclusion. By then I’ll be asking “Would you like fries with that?”

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