You can finish watching this program on our website, c span. Org as we take you bye to a house hearing examining recent glitches in the va website. Ineffective payments to veterans and their survivors. You are watching live coverage on cspan3. Were here today to challenge the problems on the va. Gov. Va aggressively both a va. Gov over the past five years. Today it is more than website. It is a platform for veterans to access the care and benefits that they have earned. I agree the veterans should be able to manage their healthcare and benefits online. Rather than waiting on hold with a call center to do everything. But to perform all those functions va. Gov now interfaces with most of the systems we have discussed in previous hearings. Those systems and interfaces have significant bugs and some of them are simply obsolete. Va. Org has gaps and veterans falling into those gaps. Nearly 100,000 veterans, that we know of have been struggling with the va. Org bugs to access their benefits. In some cases, these problems have been happening for years. Va officials only recently discovered and disclosed it. In january, va notified the committee that 32,000 veterans disability compensation claims submitted through the website had been rejected. This had been happening since 2018. The website did not alert the veterans that an error had happened. They thought that everything was normal. This is unbelievable. They just chalked it up to the va being slow on the delivery of their benefits. They never even called or complained about it. That is how bad the va reputation is. The website did not alert them a error had happened. They thought everything was normal. It took the va seven months to send letters to notify them. Last month, as a tender file deadline under the pact act was approaching, about 5600 veterans received their messages when they tried to submit on the website. The va initially had no idea what was even happening or that it was happening. On top of that, more than 56,000 veterans requested to add or remove dependence on the va. Org and its predecessor were not process. Causing them to be overpaid or underpaid. This has been happening all the way back to 2011. The 56,000 is just an estimate and the department is still trying to come up with a plan on how to address the situation. Each of these four incidents was somewhat different. They indicate a troubling pattern. Were going to get to the bottom of what happened and whether the glitches extend and be on the benefits functions of va. Org and into other areas. This is the situation where the va is badly in need of independent oversight. The veterans need to know that our witnesses have thoroughly investigated the extent of the problems and this is not just the tip of the iceberg. The impacted veterans also need to hear from va much more quickly. Months and years is completely unacceptable. Seven months to mail letters to the veterans whose claims were rejected as unacceptable. The veterans who depend on updates for the process deserve immediate help. When the Va Central Office gets around to it, that is not an acceptable response. Va. Org is vital and we need to make sure it is built on a solid foundation. I appreciate our witnesses joining us to today to discuss how we are going to do just that. With that, i would yield to ranking mentor member for your Opening Statement. Thank you for the witnesses to be here today. Va. Org is the primary portal to access the care and benefits they have earned through their service to our country. It is concerning when we hear that there is an issue with the website. Especially when congress learns of three major issues in less than one month. In august va. Org failed to keep up with what we all knew was going to be a massive influx of disability claims. Veterans had intel 11 59 on august 9th to submit their claims or intent to file a claim associated with the p. A. C. T. Act to have any potential benefits backdated to when the bill was signed in august of 2022. Va received so many submissions that it broke the website ability to process them. Veterans began receiving error messages that cause confusion about whether the claim had been received or not. Earlier this month we learned that over 56,000 veterans were potentially negatively impacted by the failure to process veterans dependence that is update. And that it took v8 over a decade to recognize and fix this issue. Va still does not have a full understanding of the impacts of this issue on veterans in which veterans were affected. In the same notification, we also learned that there is an issue with va. Org that has been preventing veterans from being able to appeal their claim decision, which is their right. I understand that va claims these issues affect a small percentage of veterans. We owe it to our veterans to ensure they have access to functional and Reliable Technology to access their care and benefits. I do want to say thank you to secretary del benny and secretary jacobs for that level of transparency they have provided on the recent issues with the va. Org. I am not an i. T. Expert. I wont pretend that i fully understand the Technology Aspects of the issue. I do understand how they are impacting vendors. I appreciate the office of information and technology. Seems to be hyper focused on not only getting these identified issues fixed but establishing a process to ensure that any future issues are identified and fixed more quickly. I am happy to hear this and will work with the chairman to ensure that we hold you to it. While we are talking about va. Org, i want another issue with the website. Compliance with section 508 of the rehabilitation act of 1973, it continues to be an issue with vas website. We have raised this issue repeatedly with va and we continue to hear that va. Org fails to meet the needs of blind and low vision veterans. This is disappointing, especially as many of these veterans lost their vision due to conditions attributed to their military service. We owe them the same level of access as their sighted colleagues. I hope to hear from todays witnesses about a plan to ensure that this resource is available to all veterans equally. I look forward to todays testimony and i yield back. Thank you. Two thank you, p. A. C. T. Mr. Control or any other members of the data subcommittee be permitted to participate. Without objection, so ordered. I will now introduce the witnesses on our first and only panel today. We have assistant secretary for information of technology del benny. We have Charles Worthington. And finally have the executive director of the office of business integration in the better and benefits administration but i asked the witness to please stand and raise your right hands. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to provide is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Thank you and let the record reflect that all the witnesses have answered in the affirmative. Mr. Del benny, you are now recognized to deliver your Opening Statement on behalf of the panel. Good afternoon. Tonic for the opportunity to testify about department of Veterans Affairs va. Org website. I am accompanied today by mr. Charles worthington, the chief Technology Officer and ray tell us executive director of the office of integration from the Veterans Benefits administration. As this committee is aware of from our numerous meetings since my confirmation va is committed to providing Exceptional Care services and seamless unified experience to our veterans. Vas office of information and technology cooperates with various offices to achieve this mission with the delivery of stateoftheart technology, including va. Org and modernize website with the digital front door. Nearly 14 million unique veteran and others use va. Org each month to access information about the services and benefits provided by the department. In august, we had over 19 million unique users. In healthcare space in particular we are an Industry Leader in our veterans uses of the healthcare portal. The website is designed with a clear and intuitive navigation menu enabling users to quickly find the information that they need. Va. Org is one of the most and i guess a comprehensive digital experience that provides veterans of single location to learn about, apply for use and manage their va healthcare benefits. Since is relaunch in 2018, va. Org has seen dramatic growth. Both with users and the breath of Services Offered on the platform. There is numerous features to va. Org during antigrowth period. For example, veterans can now apply for caregiver benefit, request a debt waiver and reviewed their debt and copayment balances, schedule healthcare appointment and check in for those appointments on the day of service. Integrating the legacy systems into va. Org is not without its challenges. As we actively notify on september 5th, va uncovered several technical issues impacting a small percentage of the website traffic we are working very hard to address. I want to make it clear that despite the limited scope of these issues, we view these problems is unacceptable. We deeply apologize to the impacted veterans. We are working relentlessly to ensure no veteran is negatively impacted by these technical issues and ensuring veterans receive effective dates and respect their original submission timeline and for giving any overpayment that that may have been created due to the technical mistakes. Moving forward, the department is taking immediate steps to prevent these issues or issues like this from happening in the future. Va will resolve these issues and prevent them from happening again and addressing more quickly when needed. Most importantly, make sure that all impacting veterans get the better of services they deserve as quickly as possible. Chairman rosen dell and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today. Va. Org is one of the most important initiatives and we have made a great deal of progress amid tremendous growth and capability. We look forward to continuing to work with a subcommittee to address our greatest priorities and the challenges we face in our digital transformation. We value your commitment and support for our veterans. This concludes my testimony and we look forward to answering your questions. Thank you, mr. Delbene. Your statement will be entered into the hearing record. We will now proceed to questioning and i recognize myself for five minutes. Mr. Delbene, at least 94,500 veteran benefits have been delayed or disrupted because of the va. Org problems. I understand you are proud of the website with the veterans that use it. Misses 94,500 veterans and their families whose personal finances may be disrupted or who may be waiting for months or years, as we have heard in the record already, for disability compensation. Mr. Delbene, do you believe there is an acceptable error rate in va. Org. If so, what would you define as an acceptable error rate. Atomic for the question. I dont think the is anything acceptable to have errors that occur on the website that are processed in a way that assures their intent. By that, in many places i think we have challenges that were working on is when an error occurs in the system, make sure he gets passed off to human being who can do the right thing in most cases. In that sense, i dont think there is an acceptable error rate. More particularly, i think every air that does occur because of software, errors will occur. We need to fix those errors and we need to make sure a veteran is handling the appropriate way what concerns me the most about the va. Gov is that it took years to notice that i want to hear about your internal review emma causes. First and foremost, how will you approve your ability to detect and solve these problems in realtime . Thanks for the question but im going to passes 12 Charles Worthington and have him take that one on. Tonic for the question. We are working right now to create too great a review of each of the products so we can get a realtime sense of the error rates with all of the downstream services to deliver that future. Something that we learn as result of this incident as we did not have a fast enough ability to identify these issues as they occurred. That is what we are focused on with this First Priority of Getting Better monitoring. We made a lot of process progress on we announce that to you all. All the benefit application forms are in this dashboard with a great sense of what the success rate of each of those actions are. We view that that the time that it took the va to identify these problems is unacceptable. We are working hard to make sure that does not happen again. Mr. Worthington, as you answer these questions. We will identify four areas that have extensive problems and delays. Which ones are you addressing first . And exactly how are you working how many people do you have focused on those tasks . This is a top priority of our va. Gov team to get a sense of health of each of those products. Weve got to stand up with a dozen or more folks talking about the progress in increasing the monitoring of the systems. As i mentioned, the benefits application forms are already monitored and paying a lot of attention to the Health Enrollment form, which is the upcoming deadline of september 30th for the special enrollment period. We are seeing positive results with that. As mr. Delbene said, the ability to know with confidence that once a veteran has hit submit that that transaction will be honored, even if there is an error. Were paying attention to those because we know that those are the source of the two issues that led to all this. What do you think is a reasonable turnaround time for disability compensation claims . Let me preface that with assuming that all the proper documentation is turned in. All the proper documentation is turned in, what you think is a reasonable time for dispel the claim . Right now we define it is about 25 days. In the world i live in, were trying to do as quickly as possible. That is the expectation veterans have in the real world. The answer is as quick as we can. I know weve had different programs to do that. I hope that answers your question. Mr. Worthington, have you determined the va. Gov problems and whether the extent and the other function of the website like healthcare . We are looking closely at that exact question to identify if there were similar problems such as the dependency claim or 526 claim errors. We have not identified anything on that scale. That is something we are looking at very intently. I am down to i would like to recognize Ranking Member cherfilusmccormick for your questions. I wanted to get back to the issue that you touched upon. I want to be clear. Why did it take you so long to become aware of the issues . If i may tonic for the question. You have two separate that into which particular issue. In the case of dependency application to change, early on in 2021 there is identification of an issue. The rules that were processing those were failure cases. At that point, there was a processing in place that were processing error sheet that came out in a report that came out. Those were all manually handled by people to make sure the right thing happen. We thought that was the extent of the problem instead we heard from veterans that there were other issues coming up. That was actually towards the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. For the longer period of time, we did not think there was a problem. Once the broader problem was identified, we set up a Cross Functional Team to go tackle that issue and solve the bug that we do not know existed. In that case, that explains the gap. It was a very rapid to find issue. The claims application, that was found quite rapidly and resolved rapidly. The issue we have in august of the website having errors, we fix that quickly as well. It depends upon the particular instance youre talking about. We were talking about the issues identified on september 5th in congressional notification. Which you touched upon. Can i get your that any veteran who missed out on the benefits because of the status issue will be made whole and they will receive those backdated benefits . If i may, i will have mr. Handle that one. We are in the process of assessing those. We will make sure that they get the benefit that they have earned and deserve. No better and will see a debt because of the i. T. System failure. That is the process that working for not to create a debt because of the issue that caused it. Mr. Delbene im sure youre where we hold a series of hearings every year in the spring. We hear pleas from the blinded Veterans Association for a better oversight of va section 508 compliance. They have raised concerns about only va. Gov but also with the i. T. System that veterans use both as recipients of care and benefits. And as employees of p. A. Why have they not met the mandate of section 508 compliance specifically the va. Gov portal that veterans rely on to access their care and benefits. We take compliance very seriously. I personally think it is a commitment that we need to honor an amp of our work there. Let me break that into a couple of different parts. The first thing is va. Gov has a lot of content on it but it can be separate into webpages or a lot of pdfs. We have been making steady progress in identifying the most webpages and use pdfs and making sure they are compliant with 508. If you then take the va. Gov, the functional part of it. It was built from the beginning to have a framework that makes it accessible to the blind. As we move more and more functionality onto va. Gov , we will inherit that accessibility. The one pivot we have made is to actually target the things that are most used. Whether it is documentation or functionality. I think were doing pretty well there. There is more to do. Know that we take the commitment of 508 incredibly seriously. What is your timeline for full implementation or substantial completion . The effort towards 508 will be an ongoing effort. If you take webpages, we are in the 90 compliance in terms of the number of hits that happened are going from the most popular pages on down. Some of the thornier issues are in application spaces where there is customs. I those i think those will take a while. I meet with the team every month to review our progress. Do you have a goal date arrange that we can follow up on . It is a good question. I would love to get in a regular dialogue with you so i can show you our progress. I think we actually have an update for staffing on our progress on the 27th. If there are specific questions, we would love to talk to you and walking. But i would love a regular engagement. Thank you, mr. Chairman. I go