VA completes education claims system in time for fall semester

The Veterans Affairs Department has deployed a fully automated system to process benefits for veterans attending college under the 2008 GI bill just in time to manage the enrollment for the 2010 fall semester, top VA officials said during a press briefing on Thursday.

Roger Baker, chief information officer at VA, said the new system, developed in partnership with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic, went live on Aug. 23 and relies on rules engine software to increase the number of claims an examiner can process from 2,000 a day to 10,000.

The new GI bill, formerly the 2008 Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, greatly expands the benefits the government gives veterans for college education from the previous version. The benefits are more complex than the previous GI bill, which essentially paid veterans a flat rate to cover tuition. The new bill calculates tuition benefits based on the veteran's length of service and the highest tuition charged by a public college in the veteran's home state. Separate housing allocations are based on cost-of-living allowances for 300 ZIP codes.

The rules engine software automatically works through the complex set of permutations to determine the tuition aid a veteran is entitled to, whether the school is a public or private university, and a housing allowance to determine rates, Baker said.

In the fall of 2009, the first year Afghanistan and Iraq veterans were able to apply for education benefits under the new GI bill, VA was unable to process claims because it mostly relied on a manual system. By the end of September 2009, well into the beginning of the school year, it had processed only half the pending claims. To ensure students would have funds to take care of daily living expenses, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki ordered emergency payments up to $3,000 each to students who had not received a check in early October.

Keith Wilson, director of the education service at VA, said the new system allows VA to handle an increase in claims more smoothly compared to last year. The department has so far received 206,000 claims this year, up 14 percent from 157,000 in the 2009 fall semester. VA has approved payment for 130,000 of those claims, he said.

VA still needs to automate the processes for colleges and universities to input the required data on veteran students and the payment information sent to the Treasury Department, Wilson said. Data from schools will be entered automatically into the system later this fall, and the department will install by December software to automatically manage output of payment data.