Modernization. Good afternoon. The subcommittee will come to other. This is or second hearing on the va. Gov bugs and the struggles they have created f veterans to access their benefits. Id trying welcome o witnesses back to the discussion on these issues. The number of veterans affected now exceeds 120,000. To recap about 32,000 veterans submitted their disabout it compensation claims through the website. But the claims were never established in the system that processes them. This has been happening since 2018. In addition, roughly 81,000 veteran and family members request to add or remove dependents on va. Gov as the spread saysor system was not processed causing them to be overpaid under paid. This has been happening all the way back to 2011. On top of that, other veterans were unable to access the notice of disagreement form on va. Gov to appeal denials of their claims this. Went o for about five weeks before being discovered. I understand that o witnesses have an update on the number vetera that have encountered that problem. Mistakes are bound to happen. But it is unacceptable tt some of these here errors rsisted the forears or years before anyone discovered them in the last hearing, i urge urged our witnesses to be more proactive in contacting the veterans and offing them help. I would like an update on that. Many of these veterans and survivors depend on thei va nefitsor more or all of their income. They nd to hear from the v. Much more quickly. All need be confident that errors in the va. Gov and other systems will never aga be allowed to come pound undetect and impact so ma people. To that end, i will be introducing t va watchg over electronic benefitact. The v. A. Now has a watch tower to monit the website and this thislegislation will make sure it performs as intend. I would like to turn to another problem that our veterans are facing. In early november, the va informed the committee that it has been overpaying pensions to thats 900 veterans because of inaccurate data from the Social Security administration and a faulty system to self report their income. It may impact as much as 40,000 veterans appreciate our witnesses explaining the situation to the Committee Staff last week. But there are sll quite a few out standing questions. Wh did the v. A. Leaders fit realize that the data probls were creating pension overpayments . I understand theres a Debt Collection moratorium,ut how has that been communicated to all the veterans and how exactly does it work . When are the debts going to be erased . And why has the v. A. Still not determined the status of the other 30,000 veterans who may be affected . These tecical issues each affected Veterans Benefits in different ways. But in eh case, we expect the v. A. To put aside whats convenient for the bureaucracy and move faster. With that,ly yield to Ranking Member mccormick for her statements. Thank you so much to our witnesses for being here today and testifying. Its now been two months since we met to discussion issues with va. Gov. I look forward to hearing from witnesses how theyre fixing the problem through the e. T. Systems that allowed veterans to fall through the cracks. We learned that v. A. Shut down an online form that veterans used to file pensions claimsments iveeen told that the form had not been uated since 2018 and nlongeratched the paper fortunately useby v. A. Today. I have concerns that the form went so long without being updateand im curious what v. A. Is going to evaluate other electronic forms that may be out of date. I look forwa to the conversation today. Thank you. And i yield back. Turks Ranking Member cherfus mccormick. First, we have assistant secretary for information and Technology Kirk dell beny thank you for coming in. We have officer charles worthington. Again, thank you for coming in. From the Veterans Benefits administration we have mr. Ray tellez. Good to see you again executive director of the office of business integration. And joining him is mr. Paul shoot, the assist at that particular time deputy and secretary for theffice of benefits delivery. Thank you again. I asked the witnesses to please stand and raise your rite hands. Do you solemnly swear under penaltof perjury that the testony youre about to provide is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Let the record reflect that all witnesses have answered in the affirmative. Mr. Dell benny you are recognized for five minutes to deliver your openg statement on behalf of the panel. Good afternoon, chairman, rankinmember cherflus mccormick and distinguished members of the subcommittee. Thank you for this testimony. Im accompanied by mr. Paul shoot under secretary of autoted benefits divery v. B. A. D mr. Raymond tellez of v. B. A. And mr. Charles worthington office of Information Technology v. A. Is committed to providing the service theyve become to experien and they strive to be that digital front door. Each month users access v. A. Gov to manage their v. A. Benefits and healthcare. As an update, the department would like to share our progress in recent v. A. Gov issues. With respect to the submission errors as youll regard we previously identified 32,000 claims that were not established due to the technical herb shoe. Currently v. A. Has established 22,257 of those disability claims and sent outreach letters to impacted veterans. As of november, 89. 4 of the established disabilities claims were decided. The remaining identify claims be established in december of this year. With respect to the submission claims errors v. A. Identify 45,903 who filed a request to update their dependency status and di not have successfully fro saysed. Have a. Completed and sits and identified 81,000 vet looks filed and did not have their process. V. A. Established 70, 476 and has completed 45. 2 . The remaining 10, 575 depen done city claims will be established in december. The record high claims submission, the back end of v. A. Government system have increase in timeout errors va. Government was unable to process the file. And they contacted them. They its department identify 429 leading establishments and these were processed in set with the notice of disagreement issue, incept v. A. Identified a technical issue by noting a drop of about 900 appeals from the normal va. Government submission vome. They quickly deployed a fix. 3, 152 may not have been impacked by the inability to load the web page the notice of disagreement form. V. A. Will contact the impacted veterans to make sure they will successfully present their appeal without any i. Packet to their appeal date. To intify any potential issues, the office had a code yellow. It includes monitoring the health of the most important application and features of va. Gov and making these monitors accept national a single place. Additionally code yellow insures a Government Employee knows about the issue within 24 hours. So far 80 of va. Govs most important features were monitored and the va monitoring by the end of quarter one of fiscal year 2024. Finally unrelated to va. Gov issues i would like to address the va. Gov patient application interactive form being unavailae from november 223 to january 31 of 2024. The v. A. Is updating the forms so it matches the current paper version of the form. Veterans and their families a accredited representatives are still able to download the current Application Form and submit it on access va. Chairman rosendale, and member of f the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. As previously mentioned va. Gov is the front door for veterans. Veterans need to have confidence that their services are available, accurate and secure. I look forwardo working with the subcommittee to address the challenge that is we face in our digital transformation. This concludes my testimony and i look to any questions you may. Have thank you, mr. Dell benny. The written statement will be enter into tearing record. And we will now proceed with questioning. I recognize myself for five minutes. Ill begin with you mr. Tellez. I would like to return to the disability compensation claim submitted to va. Gov were not established in the is why are you only notifying the veterans . Why have we wait sod long to provide them with the one that is have not notified with the others with any information whatsoever . Thank you, congressman for your question. I believe we are note fight of the time of the claim of establishment because thatss the time that were taking action into claim. It explains why we are taking that action for them. So why wouldnt we give information to the veterans whos claims havent been recognized as all and thats let them know that tha that they havent been recognized . Theres a lot of veterans throughout that are completely oblivious, ok, to the fact that they havent even been recognized. Their claim hasnt been recognized yet. Why arent we sending some kind of noticefication for all of that. Ill take that back to see how we can u social media to continue to spread that message on that issue. Theyre walking through thinking theyve been theyve been brought recognize into the system. Do youee where my concn is . And they dont even know that theres a problem. I do. Thank you, congress match they have a question or concern, they can call the National Call center 18008271000 8 00 a. M. To 9 00 p. M. If they do have questions wheel we continue to socialize only of the challenges we have withhe v. A. Ignorance may be bliss as a saying but when you are trying to get a benefit, ok, and apply for it and youve applied for it and you dont know that it has not been recognized by the system, then these folks arent even aware that they have a problem. So as you give an 800 number out there to folks that arent even aware of the fact that theres a problem why would they even bother to call . How and when do you intend to notify the remaining veterans and process their claims . Thank you, congressman. We have a process for the remaining of veterans who have submitted the claims. We will notify those this month. And i will put thos claims under control in v. Vbms. How do you decide what claims its going to be in do we have a priority checklist from veterans that are either impacted by by income or is it by chronological date . What matrix are you using to make a dem nation about when you Contact People . Thank you, congress match ill ask mr. Shoot if he can respond to that, please. Very good. So we dont have a prioritized list in terms of incomer other demographic factors. What we did is we looked at the population of vet looks were impacted by the 526 application issue on va. Gov. applications with can work quickly and make them whole. Weve got about 7,000 veterans le to establish and process their claims. But there is no order of prioritization in terms of the factor that is you mentioned. Someone who has a more severe disability may be relng on that income suspect going to get some preferential treatment to someone who is literally subsidizing their claim. We continue to follow the protocol that is we have for prioritizing claims for certain populations of veterans, termly ill, homeless, things of that nature. So i understand once the claim is established. The problem is going out and actually establishing the claims for the people who have tried to. Are you understanding the question im asking . Ok. They think that they are already process and they are not. Sand what im trying to do is determine exactly what criteria are you using to get ahold of thespeople . And if if theres not any sense of urgency or priority given to, which it sounds like what youre doing as a as a matter of fact quite the contrary in your words youre trying to utilize the easiest cases possible to process faster . We are working establish the claims that question decide as quickly as possible. Those are the claims that get established first, correct. Ok were going to have a couple of rounds here. Im goingo go ahead and recognize representative cherflus mccormick for five minutes of question. Under secretary dell beny, it seems like you have been left holdholding the bag. Many of these i. T. Issues have been uncovered for yearser through countless c. I. O. s. You happen to be the one in the seat when we have found them. And areeft to answer allhe hard questions. I thank you for the effort to get the i. T. System up tohe standa that we expect and that veterans deserve. I would like to spend my time geing some updates on the issues we discussed in september. At our last hearing on vad. Gov we discovered 45,000 ben fish areas who aempted to update their information. When did the issue first start and how did we identify it . Thank you for your question. Actually, i think i would pass that call that question to paul who can answer it more completely paul we first discovered the herb shoe in august 2021. That the time we found a defect between the interaction between our va. Gov and vbms systems. That theime, we had delivered a capability to generate a report. Any yme issue was encountered so that our office of Information Technology team could pass a report basically to v. B. A. So we could manually establish and work those claims. It wasnt until 2023 that we learned that they were getting an increased volume of veterans who had filednd did not receive a decision. That the point in time, we stood up an integrated project team to delve in and see if there were other herb shoes that we hadnt canted for. And thats what led to the population of 45,000 veterans that we reported at the last hearing. Has the number of veterans identified since o last hearing . And what is the status of those beneficiary status has changed . As part of our review weve identified an affect vet rap and weve identified 81,000 veterans who may have been impact bed this issue. Were cfident that not all 18,000 are impacd but we want to conduct a review of each and every one of those claims to make sure we make those veterans hole. When do you demand the updates will have been completeed . So to date, weve established 70,000 of that 81,000 veteran population and 45 of them have been completed so far were planning to establish the remaining 1 1,000 claims later is month. Thank you. Also during thahearing we discs that approximately 32,000 veterans who attempted file for disabilities compensation were not correctly established. When did this issue first start . And when did you identify it . We first identified this issue in november of 2022. That the tim it was impacti about 75,000 claims per week accoing to our projections. The issue dated back to 2018. The month ok. To clarify 75 cases per week what were anticipating the impact to be. That month, we deterned there were about 32,000 veterans impacted by this issue and we began work on a remediation plan. Has the number of veterans identified changed since our last hearing . And what is the status of those na that are in claim . The number has not changed. To date weve been able to establish 25,000 of those claims and 90 of them have been completed were planning to establish the remaining 7,000 later this month. Thank you. I yield back. Thank you very much. Thank you, rankingember. Ly recognize my goofriend from texas mr. Self. Hank you, mr. Case a lot of process as normal we hear in your briefing packets, a lot of process. Who wants to answer this question . What is the Financial Impact potential Financial Impact on the wellbeing of individual veterans for the dability compensation claims and pensi payments errors . Who was toes that . Whats the potential impact on individual vet france in. Whwants to answer that . Whats the potential impact on the veg veterans in . Whats a reasonable guess ohow much they e . And thei want to know what you think the figure is v. A. Wide. So individl veterans and v. V. A. Wide . What is your liable . Thank you, congressman for you qstion. In terse to first part, the Financial Impact, i think its t. B. D. Because were reviewing those claims. One of the things that we are working on is no harm to the veteran. Where there may be a debt resulted, there are things tt we can mitigate through our normal process an weve got rules to handle that. And even with the pension overpayment congreman rosen dale spoke of earlier we have authority that is address that. Ill have to take your question two and three back because i dont know that we know enough information to be able to answer here. Let me give you just back of the envelope figures, ok . And there are some there are some variables here that if we use pension amount of 2,000, overpayment amount 5 , 10 and you work with those figures. You talking about depending on whether youre talk about the 10,000 veterans or youre talking about the 40,000 veterans and ive got it potentially hundreds of millions of dlars that veterans owe the v. A. Is that reasonable . Congressman, im not prepared to address that. We were not prepared to answer the questions on payment. T were happy to take that question back for you and get you a response or a briefing for you and your staff. I suspect thayou need to know that answer because this is a direct liability that the vetera have to the v. A. And when youre addressing how youre going to handle it my second question is i still see that you havent contacted some of the veterans depending on the issue here. Th is Serious Business for the individual vet vans and i want veterans and i want to know why you havent contacted every single veteran. This is, i think youre using code yellow. Why is t this not code red because this directly impacts our vet france in do you verans . Do you have a code red . If a system is down thats probably the closest thing to a code red and our goal is to get that system back up as soon as possible. I triage with the rest of our team every single issue that happens ithe entire v. A. Infrastructure every day at 8 00 a. M. And we we actually measure our time to recovery on our systems each and every month. We do it a monthly operations review to make sure that anything that you consider a code red gets considered super quickly. Im not interested in code red. Im more interested in the individual veterans being coacted that they have a problem. So let me ill pass it to paul and to ray in a moment. But i think the one thing that is the guiding principal is the 911 we once we establish for a group thats similar in an issue like this that there is a claim that appears be valid. We establish those as quickly as we can. And once weve established them we communicate to that veteran. This whole notion that a vet rap would go not knowing whether they have a claim out standing or not, i dont think thats usually the case. The moment that we know that theres a class of folks that we should communicate to, we always strive toommunicate to them as quickly as we c