The Department of Veterans Affairs is suffering from a series of information technology glitches that has caused GI Bill benefit payments covering education and housing to be delayed or, in some cases, never delivered, NBC News reported.
“I’m about to lose everything that I own and become homeless,” said Shelley Roundtree, a U.S. Army veteran and student at Berkeley College in New York. “I don’t want to be that veteran on the street begging for change because I haven’t received what I was promised.”
Veterans across the country are still waiting for the VA to catch up with a backlog created after President Donald Trump signed the Forever GI Bill in 2017. The landmark piece of legislation greatly expanded benefits for veterans and their families, but it did not upgrade the VA’s technical capabilities to account for those changes.
It’s unclear how many GI Bill recipients were impacted by the delays, but as of Nov. 8, more than 82,000 were still waiting for their housing payments with only weeks remaining in the school semester, according to the VA. Hundreds of thousands are believed to have been affected.
A VA spokesperson told NBC News over email that “further system changes and modifications are being made and testing is ongoing on the IT solution” to fix the delay in monthly stipend payments.
Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images, File
Source: NBC San Diego
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