The Tip of the 9/11 GI Bill Iceberg

Top officials of the Veterans Affairs Department revised the figures they put out yesterday on payments the agency has made to veterans under the post-9/11 GI bill, and said that as of today, only 24,186 vets have received checks -- or roughly 12 percent of the 200,000 claims it expected to receive by the end of the summer.

Tammy Duckworth, the VA's Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs said on a call this morning that the VA has to date received enrollment certifications from schools for 27,735 veterans and has processed payments for 24,186.

Yesterday, the VA said it had paid more than 61,000 post-9/11 benefits claims totaling $50 million since August. But, Lynn Nelson, deputy director of Education Services at the VA, said those numbers were confusing, as they in some cases represented three separate payments to one veteran.

Nelson said one of the problems the VA faced with payments on the post-9/11 GI Bill today is its complexity, particularly when it comers to calculating the housing allowance, which is based on location. This requires heavy manual processing of claims until the VA installs a new automated system next year.

Duckworth acknowledged that the VA faces problems and added the department is not trying to make excuses for its performance. To handle its backlog, Duckworth said the VA has put claims examiners on overtime, including weekend shifts.

Nelson said the VA is processing post-9/11 GI Bill claims in an average of days. That's not the experience of James Martin, a Marine Iraq war veteran at Boston College Law School who said it took the VA six weeks to process his request for a certificate of eligibility and he expects it will be another six weeks before he gets a check.

Neither Duckworth nor Nelson could estimate the number of post-9/11 payment claims in the pipeline, due in part to the fact that some schools have not yet submitted claims for their students.

But, if VA wants to get a real handle on the backlog, I suggest either Duckworth or Nelson take a two-stop Metro trip from the VA headquarters on Vermont Ave. in Washington to The George Washington University.

GW student Brian Hawthorne, who served two tours as an Army medic in Iraq and is the legislative director of Student Veterans of America, said none of 400 veterans at the school have received a payment from the VA.

The VA pays tuition directly to the schools under the post-9/11 GI Bill, and a separate housing allowance and stipend - which runs $1,900 a month in DC -- directly to the veteran, with these payments due next month.

Joe Mancinik, a Navy veteran I mentor who attends GW said he faces a real financial crunch if he does not receive that stipend in time next month. Joe has taken out loans from GW and said, "I'm in fairly serious financial trouble with an overdrawn account, a late credit card payment, and the rent coming due soon."

Joe added, that anxiety about payment "is making it extremely difficult to focus on my studies. Watching the cash register screens at school show hundreds and thousands of dollars in the accounts of my peers while mine reads a few dollars, or none at all, is humiliating and terrifying."

Richard Smith, of VoteVets, told Duckworth and Nelson that he has tapped out his credit cards and has $120 in his checking account while he awaits his stipend payment next month.

He asked them what the could do for him and other similar situation if they do not get that check next moth. They did not have an answer.