VA automates Post-9/11 GI Bill claims - Military News | News From Afghanistan, Iraq And Around The World - Military Times

VA automates Post-9/11 GI Bill claims

Veterans Affairs Department officials announced Thursday they have now fully automated Post-9/11 GI Bill claims, a process that includes calculating and paying benefits that should streamline the year-old program.

Full automation, being used by all 12,000 employees assigned to process GI Bill claims, comes just in time to help handle a surge of new students using the program. Keith Wilson, VA’s education service director, said enrollment has jumped 14 percent for the fall 2010 term compared with the previous fall.

VA is processing about 10,000 GI Bill claims a day, compared with about 2,000 claims a day last year, Wilson said.

“We are light years ahead of where we were last year,” he said. “We are very happy with how we started off.”

Full automation allows processing retroactive payments of housing allowances for students who received the wrong rates. The payments, which could be up to $230 per month for some students, are the result of difficulties VA encountered in updating payment amounts last January when the military housing allowance rates — on which stipends are based — were increased.

Students who received living stipends since Jan. 1 will receive a lump-sum payment representing the difference between what they received and the payment they should have received, said Roger Baker, VA’s chief information officer.

“We are off and rolling,” Baker said.

Automation will make it easier to make further changes in the future, Wilson and Baker said.

Switching from the old to new processing systems involved converting files on more than 600,000 veterans who have applied for certificates of eligibility for the new GI Bill, many of whom have not yet enrolled in school.

For the fall 2009 term, about 153,000 students — mostly veterans but also some immediate family members of active-duty service members using transferred benefits — used the Post-9/11 GI Bill. So far this year, about 206,000 students have applied for benefits and 130,000 have already been approved for payment, Wilson said.

If the automation process continues to go well, there is a chance VA would take some of its claims processors off the GI Bill. VA spokeswoman Katie Roberts said it is likely that experienced claims experts would be assigned to other claims issues.