[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
REVIEWING THE DIGITAL G.I. BILL PROGRAM
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JOINT HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY
AND THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY MODERNIZATION
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON VETERANS' AFFAIRS
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2023
__________
Serial No. 118-25
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABL IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via http://govinfo.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
53-109 PDF WASHINGTON : 2024
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COMMITTEE ON VETERANS' AFFAIRS
MIKE BOST, Illinois, Chairman
AUMUA AMATA COLEMAN RADEWAGEN, MARK TAKANO, California, Ranking
American Samoa, Vice-Chairwoman Member
JACK BERGMAN, Michigan JULIA BROWNLEY, California
NANCY MACE, South Carolina MIKE LEVIN, California
MATTHEW M. ROSENDALE, SR., Montana CHRIS PAPPAS, New Hampshire
MARIANNETTE MILLER-MEEKS, Iowa FRANK J. MRVAN, Indiana
GREGORY F. MURPHY, North Carolina SHEILA CHERFILUS-MCCORMICK,
C. SCOTT FRANKLIN, Florida Florida
DERRICK VAN ORDEN, Wisconsin CHRISTOPHER R. DELUZIO,
MORGAN LUTTRELL, Texas Pennsylvania
JUAN CISCOMANI, Arizona MORGAN MCGARVEY, Kentucky
ELIJAH CRANE, Arizona DELIA C. RAMIREZ, Illinois
KEITH SELF, Texas GREG LANDSMAN, Ohio
JENNIFER A. KIGGANS, Virginia NIKKI BUDZINSKI, Illinois
Jon Clark, Staff Director
Matt Reel, Democratic Staff Director
------
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY
DERRICK VAN ORDEN, Wisconsin, Chairman
NANCY MACE, South Carolina MIKE LEVIN, California Ranking
C. SCOTT FRANKLIN, Florida Member
JUAN CISCOMANI, Arizona FRANK J. MRVAN, Indiana
ELIJAH CRANE, Arizona MORGAN MCGARVEY, Kentucky
DELIA C. RAMIREZ, Illinois
------
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY MODERNIZATION
MATTHEW M. ROSENDALE, SR., Montana, Chairman
NANCY MACE, South Carolina SHEILA CHERFILUS-MCCORMICK,
KEITH SELF, Texas Florida, Ranking Member
GREG LANDSMAN, Ohio
Pursuant to clause 2(e)(4) of Rule XI of the Rules of the House, public
hearing records of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs are also
published in electronic form. The printed hearing record remains the
official version. Because electronic submissions are used to prepare
both printed and electronic versions of the hearing record, the process
of converting between various electronic formats may introduce
unintentional errors or omissions. Such occurrences are inherent in the
current publication process and should diminish as the process is
further refined.
C O N T E N T S
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THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2023
Page
OPENING STATEMENTS
The Honorable Derrick Van Orden, Chairman, Subcommittee On
Economic Opportunity........................................... 1
The Honorable Mike Levin, Ranking Member, Subcommittee On
Economic Opportunity........................................... 3
The Honorable Matthew M. Rosendale, Sr., Chairman, Subcommittee
on Technology Modernization.................................... 4
The Honorable Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Ranking Member,
Subcommittee on Technology Modernization....................... 5
WITNESSES
Mr. Joseph Garcia, Executive Director, Education Service,
Veterans Benefits Administration, U.S. Department of Veteran
Affairs........................................................ 6
Accompanied by:
Mr. Robert Orifici, Benefits and Memorial Services Portfolio
Director, Office of Information and Technology, U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs
Mr. Troy Mueller, Senior Advisor and Department Head, Veterans
Benefits Administration Mission, MITRE......................... 8
Accompanied by:
Mr. David Powner, Executive Director, Center for Data-Driven
Policy, MITRE
Mr. Kyle Michl, DGIB Senior Delivery and Chief Innovation
Officer, Accenture Federal Services............................ 10
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements Of Witnesses
Mr. Joseph Garcia Prepared Statement............................. 33
Mr. Troy Mueller Prepared Statement.............................. 39
Mr. Kyle Michl Prepared Statement................................ 40
REVIEWING THE DIGITAL G.I. BILL PROGRAM
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THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2023
U.S. House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity,
Subcommittee on Technology Modernization,
Committee on Veterans' Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittees met, pursuant to notice, at 1 p.m., in
room 360, Cannon House Office Building, Hon. Derrick Van Orden
[chairman of the subcommittee on Economic Opportunity]
presiding.
Present from the Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity:
Representatives Van Orden, Mace, Levin, Mrvan, McGarvey, and
Ramirez.
Present from the Subcommittee on Technology Modernization:
Representatives Rosendale, Mace, Self, Cherfilus-McCormick, and
Landsman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF DERRICK VAN ORDEN, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE
ON ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY
Mr. Van Orden. Good afternoon. The joint oversight hearing
of the Subcommittee of Economic Opportunity and the
Subcommittee on Technology and Modernization will now come to
order.
As you have heard me say many times, these subcommittees
are not bipartisan, they are nonpartisan. I am very proud of my
Democrat colleagues and also my Republican colleagues to
adhering to that. There is no room for that in this committee
and it will not be tolerated.
Today, we have come together once again to look out for the
interest of our veterans. Our veterans fought hard for this
country, and we owe it to them to fight hard for their
interests here in Congress. Today, our subcommittees come
together to once again examine how we can work with the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs to improve the lives of veterans
through the Digital G.I. Bill--good afternoon, sir. The Digital
G.I. Bill is intended to streamline G.I. Bill claims processing
by consolidating antiquated legacy IT systems and automating
adjudication of most claims. Some of these systems are over
thirty years old and must be modernized.
Since our last hearing in July 2022, VA has accomplished
quite a bit. There have been five releases of the software.
More than half of the supplemental claims are now automated and
the Enrollment Manager system is now up and running. This is
good news and shows a tremendous amount of progress. However,
the Digital G.I. Bill system that is being developed by VA and
Accenture is partly the result of past IT failures. Other
companies have attempted to modernize. The systems have failed
and the VA has wasted millions of dollars. We are here to
ensure that this does not happen again.
In March I received a call from the secretary about the
Digital G.I. Bill failing to process veterans' monthly housing
allowance. The Benefits Delivery Network (BDN) initially failed
to pay approximately 282,000 student veterans. While these
issues were resolved nearly immediately, there are still 4,000
veterans that received late checks due to this mistake. This
problem is reminiscent of 2018 when a similar failure resulted
in thousands of students waiting weeks and months in some cases
for the claim to be processed, which led to significant delays
in students receiving their monthly housing allowance. Time and
time again, student veterans are being left in limbo because of
the VA's failures, and that is completely unacceptable.
Also in March the new Enrollment Manager system went live.
VA had insisted the launch in January at the beginning of the
spring semester despite an outpouring of concern from the
schools about the problems that this would cause. That means
you people are not listening. The subcommittee was eventually
able to persuade the VA to listen to the boots on the ground
and push the go live back, set off the demo, effect delays in
the development of the system that no one has ever adequately
explained. I am going to say this again, you are not listening.
You are trying to run things from Washington, DC. and you are
just not listening. That is no way to run a railroad and we are
stopping that today.
It is my understanding that the next Digital G.I. Bill
release has been stalled for several months as VA takes a step
back to reevaluate the schedule and revise the cost estimates
because of the Enrollment Manager release jobs program. That is
what you are running. We must get a handle on these delays,
motivate you--it is not the VA, it is you--to keep this project
on track. Up to this point, it has been like pulling teeth to
figure out how much money has been spent. I think we got this
what, last night? You guys knew this hearing was coming a long
time ago and we got this sheet last night. Okay, no. Junk. We
need to figure out how much this is costing in a timely manner
so we can make the appropriate decisions. No one can tell us
when the project is going to be final. That, again, is
unacceptable. Cannot even get an answer when you are going to
do the next release.
We are here today to get these questions answered and I
want them answered. I do not want the I am going to get back to
you later, and then we are going to send you a note and my
people will call you. I want the answers today. If you are not
willing or able to answer them, then you are incompetent. I do
not want to come to having to subpoena you, but we are in the
majority and I will do so because you are not serving our
veterans appropriately for some reason, and I want to know what
that reason is today.
As I said, we have a fantastic relationship together on
this committee in a nonpartisan manner. Today, we are going to
vote it at 13:30. That is 1:30 for you civilians. We may have
to briefly recess. If you think we are not pushing this today,
you are wrong.
With that, I will yield to my friend and distinguished
Member of Congress, Mr. Levin, the ranking member of this
subcommittee.
OPENING STATEMENT OF MIKE LEVIN, RANKING MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE
ON ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY
Mr. Levin. I thank my friend, Chairman Van Orden, thank
Chairman Rosendale as well. I am grateful for the opportunity
to work with you guys on important legislation to help our
veterans. Thank Ranking Member Cherfilus-McCormick as well for
making this happen today.
In November 2019, I went to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and I
wanted to go see why it was taking so long for progress to be
made on how G.I. Bill benefits and other information was being
processed and went and had some really good barbecue as well in
Muskogee. What I saw with regard to G.I. Bill technology was
frankly pretty shocking. I saw systems that were being held
together with you know, 40, 50 year old technology, Common
Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) was being used in one of the
systems. Frankly, it was miraculous that the good people there
who were working really hard, were able to make any of it work.
Even really simple things, like changing an address, proved
extraordinarily difficult when you had multiple systems
running. Seeing systems that are decades old barely being held
together, really was deeply frustrating. I remember the
conversations I had back then about the money that would be
needed in order to repair things and to get things up to some
semblance of modern technology. We largely have delivered on
what was asked of us in the Congress. We have come through on
those requests. Bipartisan as well. You know, this was from the
Trump administration now on through to the Biden
administration.
It is so important that we get this right. These processors
there in Muskogee in a converted grocery store are responsible
for distributing nearly $12 billion annually in veteran
education benefits. This dysfunction has been really hard on VA
staff, but also on student veterans, on educators, on school
certifying officials.
I was very pleased that in March 2021, VA awarded the
contract to Accenture to support the Digital G.I. Bill project
to create a more user-friendly platform for students and
institutions enrolled in VA educational assistance programs, as
well as those administering those programs. We have to unite
all these legacy systems, scores of legacy systems, bringing
together activities like payments, enrollments, oversight, at
higher functioning levels--at any functional level, to be
honest with you. It is a multi-year effort, and it is planned
to take place over many increments, and I understand that that
can be frustrating too, but there needs to be a progress. That
is the key.
One year ago, our two subcommittees came together for an
update on Accenture's work, and the takeaways were pretty
positive. Improvements were being made, program incurrence were
for the most part on schedule. In preparation for today's
hearing, we asked largely the same questions. The news is still
relatively positive. This summer VA through Accenture released
something called Enrollment Manager, which replaced a legacy
system called VA Once. This is designed to improve the user
experience for school certifying officials, make it easier for
them to access student records, make it easier and faster for
institutions to exchange data and documents with VA. There are
six more releases is my understanding, planned through 2024,
all designed to make the experience better for the employees
and for the veterans alike. However, there is absolutely a need
to review the Digital G.I. Bill contract and the upcoming
release timelines to ensure both VA and Accenture are on the
same page for the releases.
Here is the deal, Congress can pass all the laws that we
want to pass. If we want to truly strengthen these benefits, if
we want to truly make this system work the way it is supposed
to work, we have got to make sure VA has the capacity to
efficiently deliver those benefits. If we do not do that, we
are just missing the point, and we are failing the veterans
that we are serving and the families that we are serving.
I think we are all committed here to doing everything that
we can collectively to make sure that is the case, to make sure
that you guys are on track, and we are going to do all we can
to hold you accountable to that.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, sir.
I would now like to yield to the Technology Modernization
(TM) subcommittee chair, Mr. Rosendale. There you are. How are
you doing, pal? You all right.
OPENING STATEMENT OF MATTHEW M. ROSENDALE, SR., CHAIRMAN,
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY MODERNIZATION
Mr. Rosendale. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The G.I. Bill is one of the most successful government
programs in history. The educational benefits in the G.I. Bill
are often credited with helping create the American middle
class of the 20th century. Not only that, it is the rare
government program that has consistently generated hundreds of
billions of economic growth for tens of billions of dollars
spent, decade after decade. Congress took big steps to enhance
the program with the post-9/11 G.I. Bill and the Forever G.I.
Bill. Now it is critical that we modernize how it operates with
the Digital G.I. Bill.
It is hard to believe just how antiquated and complicated
the information technology systems are that the VA staff use to
process G.I. Bill applications. As we have seen many times,
these IT systems are impeding service delivery to our veterans
rather than improving it. The Digital G.I. Bill (DGIB) project
began in 2021 and a year ago, the effort was making rapid
progress. It was releasing new functionality every few months,
boosting automation, and starting to phaseout legacy systems.
DGIB is one of the most successful examples of implementing a
system as a managed service. It was also the lowest cost of all
the VA's major IT modernization programs. This was an
encouraging contrast to the expensive failures we have been
seeing elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that progress has stalled. Since the fifth
DGIB release earlier this year, the VA has been stuck in an
opaque process to revise its schedule and reshuffle the
subsequent releases. There is still no date for the sixth
release as the months slip by. Unfortunately, explanations from
the VA and the contractors have been convoluted and
contradictory. We are seeing everybody at this table pointing
fingers at each other. That is the expectation that I have
today and that is what we are going to try to sort through--
sort that spaghetti out.
We have to get the Digital G.I. Bill back on track. The
most difficult and important milestones for the project are yet
to come. We need to know what percentage of original claims the
system will be able to automate. We also need to know whether
Accenture will be able to retire the benefits delivery network.
VA and contractors still need to demonstrate whether the
managed service is less expensive to operate than the hodge
podge of legacy systems. Finally, we need to know how much DGIB
will ultimately cost. MITRE's initial 10-year estimate was
between $1.3 and $1.9 billion dollars. We have heard of a
window, ok, of range of costs. That is an enormous window.
Getting any information about costs since then has been
extremely difficult. All we know is that the cost estimate
seems to be moving in the wrong direction.
I am pleased to see the Digital G.I. Bill has accomplished
more in 2 years than any other VA IT project that I have seen.
Today, it is stumbling. I believe the concept remains sound,
but the bureaucracy managing the project is floundering. We
expect better.
I want to thank our witnesses for appearing today to give
veterans and taxpayers an update on this important program. I
look forward to finding out some of these answers so the
Digital G.I. Bill can move forward.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I will now yield to the ranking member of the Subcommittee
on Technology and Modernization, a wonderful friend of mine,
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SHEILA CHERFILUS-MCCORMICK, RANKING
MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY MODERNIZATION
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Thank you, Chairman Van Orden, and
thank you, Chairman Rosendale for holding this hearing. Thank
you to all our witnesses for being here today.
We have a lot of ground to cover and a lot of opening
comments to hear. I will keep my remarks short.
G.I. bill education benefits are a key recruiting tool for
our military, especially at a time when the Department of
Defense (DoD) is struggling to meet its recruiting goals. It is
in our Nation's interest that we ensure that this benefit
continues to be an incentive to military service by ensuring
the program's future stability.
G.I. Bill benefits are also crucial to easing service
members' transition out of the military and into private sector
jobs that support the veterans and their families upon
completion of their service. While the G.I. Bill has been a
prime example of a successful benefit program for decades, it
has historically been frustratingly slow to apply for and
receive. The old paper process left veterans waiting weeks and
months for approval to start classes, frequently making them
miss registration deadlines and postponing their start of their
education. I am heartened to hear that this is improving, but
it seems we still have a lot of work to do.
VA's recent efforts to modernize the system used by managed
education benefits have been a shining example of how IT
modernization should happen. Much so it has left us wondering
why education services is able to do this and other parts of
the VA cannot. Is there a way that we can share the lessons
learned from this program with the rest of VA to improve the
implementation of IT systems across the organization? It is not
often that the TM Subcommittee gets the opportunity to hear
from an IT modernization program that seems to be going well,
but we are starting to hear about delays with the
implementation.
I hope to hear today how VA plans to overcome these
roadblocks and push the program forward. We cannot allow this
program to go the way of other IT modernization efforts.
I look forward to today's conversation, and I yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, ma'am.
Allow me to introduce our witness panel.
Our first witness is Mr. Joseph Garcia, the executive
director of education services of the Department of Veterans
Affairs. Mr. Garcia is accompanied by Mr. Robert--I am going to
slaughter your name, sir. Please.
Mr. Orifici. Orifici.
Mr. Van Orden. Orifici?
Mr. Orifici. Orifici.
Mr. Van Orden. Orifici. Ok.
Mr. Orifici. Yes.
Mr. Van Orden. Orifici. Gotcha. I want to pay the
appropriate amount of respect by pronouncing your name
properly, Mr. Orifici--the benefits and memorial service
portfolio director. Our second witness is Mr. Troy Mueller,
senior advisor, and department head at M-I-T-R-E, MITRE, and is
accompanied by Mr. Dave Powner, Center for Data Driven Policy
at the same company. Our third witness is Mr. Kyle Michl.
Mr. Michl. Michl, sir.
Mr. Van Orden. This is not working out today. I apologize,
man. I was much better at this, Mr. Michl, because we met the
other day. Digital G.I. Bill senior delivery and chief
innovation officer at Accenture Federal Services (AFS).
[Witnesses sworn]
Thank you and let the record reflect that witnesses have
answered in the affirmative.
Mr. Van Orden. Mr. Garcia, you are now recognized for 5
minutes. Just to be super clear, I mean, some of you have been
here before, that clock is 5 minutes. That is exactly as long
as you will be talking. Same thing up here.
You are now recognized for 5 minutes to deliver your
testimony on behalf of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
STATEMENT OF JOSEPH GARCIA
Mr. Garcia. Good afternoon, Chairman Van Orden, Chairman
Rosendale, Ranking Members Levin and Cherfilus-McCormick, and
other members of the subcommittees.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Digital G.I.
Bill program and the continued system improvements and
upgrades. Joining me today is Robert Orifici from VA's Office
of Information and Technology.
To ensure VA effectively serves veterans and their
families, seeking to use their G.I. Bill benefits, VA is
modernizing the G.I. Bill's IT platform to deliver benefits
faster and enhance customer experience. On March 11, 2021, VA
awarded a managed service contract to Accenture Federal
Services to develop the DGIB. This enterprise service platform
gives G.I. Bill students the ability to engage with VA and
their earned benefits through electronic outreach, intake, and
enhanced communication tools. Since inception, VA has deployed
numerous major releases. In just 6 months, VA marked its first
major milestone by deploying the processing of post-9/11 G.I.
Bill claims into the managed service. The managed service
allows for agile decision making in a single managed platform
that grows with VA's needs and responds to changes in
technology through continuous end-to-end updates. For the first
time since the inception of the G.I. Bill program, applicants
can receive a same day education benefits eligibility decision.
DGIB now provides veterans the ability to download and view
digital copies of their certificate of eligibility, no longer
waiting up for 5 days for a paper copy.
We contacted the first veteran who used the automated
system. This veteran expressed that she appreciates the efforts
VA has made to ease the process for veterans. She told friends
who are getting out how easy the process was to apply for the
post-9/11 G.I. Bill and encouraged them to apply for classes.
She hopes that more veterans will utilize this benefit in the
future. Her thoughts validate the goal of the Digital G.I. Bill
program, better support for veterans pursuing their educational
goals, modernize the tools for them, and those that support the
veterans.
In the most recent major release in March 2023, VA deployed
Enrollment Manager to help School Certifying Officials, SCOs,
submit enrollments faster. In only 4 months, VA surpassed 1.4
million enrollment certifications. Over 15,000 SCOs from over
11,000 institutions are now using Enrollment Manager. One
school certifying official shared with me personally that
Enrollment Manager does not have the same constraints as the
legacy system. Before, an SCO had to wait a day to make changes
to a certification to make sure certifications did not get
processed out of order, but now SCOs can finish a task in a
couple of minutes that previously would have taken multiple
days. Enrollment Manager speeds up the certification process,
which in turn allows SCOs to have more time with their veteran
students.
Implementing a managed service and improving automation
involves integrating numerous complex IT systems and
decommissioning decades old legacy systems. VA acknowledges
several challenges during this transition, such as the March
2023 issue with monthly housing allowance payments. Although
electronic funds transfer payments were received on the same
day, there were lessons learned and lessons applied, including
enhanced monitoring and reporting.
VA also started a manage services assessment to develop a
comprehensive risk matrix to ensure mitigation needs and
promote best practices across the business lines.
VA is committed to ensuring the continuous improvement of
the DGIB program, as well as effective stewardship of taxpayer
resources. VA is working with AFS on a bilateral modification
to the current contract to meet emergent requirements, clarify
testing capabilities, and to add additional integrations to
other VA systems.
Chairmen and ranking members, VA has made tremendous
strides in the administration of education benefits and
appreciates support of Congress as we work through the
challenges and continue our efforts to modernize educational
assistance programs.
This concludes my testimony. My colleague and I look
forward to answering any questions the committee may have.
[The Prepared Statement Of Joseph Garcia Appears In The
Appendix]
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, Mr. Garcia.
The written statement of Mr. Garcia will be entered in the
hearing record.
Mr. Mueller, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to
Deliver your testimony.
STATEMENT OF TROY MUELLER
Mr. Mueller. Chairmen Van Orden, Rosendale, ranking member,
Cherfilus-McCormick, Levin and other members of the
subcommittees, thank you for the opportunity to testify before
you today on the Department of Veterans Affairs Digital G.I.
Bill program.
Successful modernization of IT is critical to improving the
veteran experience. MITRE very much appreciates the opportunity
to share our insights on this work. MITRE is a not for profit
corporation chartered to operate in the public interest, which
includes operating six federally funded research and
development centers, or FFRDCs. The Center for Enterprise
Modernization, where I am a department head, was established in
1998 by the Department of Treasury and is now jointly sponsored
the Department of Veterans Affairs, Commerce, and the Social
Security Administration. My department is responsible for
supporting the modernization of benefits and service delivery
across all Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) lines of
business.
As an Air Force veteran, I know firsthand that serving in
the military opens the door to many benefits, including the
life changing opportunity to access higher education. Education
benefits span those entering the service through officer
training programs, tuition assistance, and fully funded degree
programs while on active duty, and the G.I. Bill and other
education programs for veterans and their families. I myself
have benefited from each of these programs. I received an Air
Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship for
college, I completed my masters under tuition assistance, and
was able to earn a doctorate utilizing the post-9/11 G.I. bill.
If not for these benefits, I would not be here before you
today. Supporting the VA, it is not merely an assignment or a
job. It is personal. It is my way of giving back for the things
I have received.
MITRE has been a partner with Education Service since 2008,
supporting the implementation of the post-9/11 G.I. Bill, and
again in 2019 to chart the path forward for modernizing claims
processing and customer service. MITRE is currently working
with the program management office in the areas of systems
engineering, program integration, life cycle cost estimating,
and organizational change. Over the past 3 plus years, the
program has had many accomplishments delivering major releases
of capability. Additionally, the VA has demonstrated gains and
maturity regarding program governance, execution, and decision
making as demonstrated by their taking action on
recommendations of the 2108 independent technical assessment of
the Colmery Act implementation.
Programs of this size and complexity intended to modernize
an environment of multiple legacy systems with numerous
dependencies and an enterprise that includes parallel
modernization efforts are never without risk. VBA, to its
credit, is currently conducting a strategic review of this
program as part of an effort to identify and evaluate
opportunities to improve delivery of benefits and services. The
outcome of the review will position the VA to maintain a rhythm
of capability delivery while ensuring good stewardship of
taxpayer dollars.
Recognizing that there will always be challenges,
complexity, and risk, I have two recommendations to share with
you today. The first is to encourage the VA to continue to
mature its contracting and program management capabilities and
ensure proper allocation and alignment of resources with
demonstrated knowledge, skills, and experience to appropriate
programs and projects. A contracting officer with extensive
experience procuring commodities is not the same as one who has
worked on and led development and execution of exquisite
acquisition strategies for large, complex, transformational
programs. The same can be said of program managers. Both are
scarce resources that require agencies to be deliberate about
career development and assignments.
The second recommendation is for the House Committee on
Veterans' Affairs and Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs to
continue the direct monthly engagement of their staff with
education service. The meeting which started during the Colmery
Act implementation has become a critical part of the battle
rhythm of program, just as important as program increment
planning sessions or a governance meetings. From our vantage
point, these monthly engagements promote transparency, provide
the opportunity for dialog, and contribute to the momentum of
risk and issue identification, mitigation, and decision making
on the program.
In closing, let me just note that of MITRE's roughly 10,000
personnel, over 1,600 are veterans. There are few duties that
our employees consider more noble and consequential than
honoring through our support to the VA the service and
sacrifice of our Nation's men and women in uniform.
On behalf of the entire MITRE team, I greatly appreciate
the opportunity to come before you today and look forward to
your questions.
[The Prepared Statement Of Troy Mueller Appears In The
Appendix]
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Mueller's written testimony now be entered into the
record. Mr. Michl, I now recognize you for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF KYLE MICHL
Mr. Michl. Thank you, sir.
Good afternoon, Chairman Van Orden, Chairman Rosendale,
Ranking Member Levin, Ranking Member Cherfilus-McCormick, and
members of the Subcommittees on Economic Opportunity and
Technology Modernization. Thank you for inviting me to testify
about our efforts in service of VA's Digital G.I. Bill delivery
program.
I am Kyle Michl, the senior delivery lead for the program
and the chief innovation officer at Accenture Federal Services.
Accenture Federal has a longstanding partnership with the
VA on programs that deliver meaningful outcomes for
beneficiaries, including veterans, service members and their
families. Since March 2021, Accenture Federal has been working
with the VA to streamline educational claims processing by
creating simple, efficient digital experiences to help veterans
and their families complete their educational journeys. I would
like to share with you a few examples of how the program is
serving veterans through continuous delivery of meaningful
outcomes.
VA and Accenture Federal have delivered major releases, as
well as a number of smaller agile releases to our platform.
These releases are aimed at driving automation and improving
time to receipt of benefits. Together, VA and Accenture Federal
have made significant strides in areas including user
experience, service enhancements, program insights, and
processing efficiencies. A number of the release highlights
include providing intuitive user experiences and rapid
decisions for eligible first-time beneficiaries. We deliver new
intuitive designs and updated functions for beneficiaries
applying for Post-9/11 G.I. Bill benefits. Improvements such as
pre-filled service history function make applications for Post-
9/11 G.I. Bill benefits easier. We have reduced eligibility
processing from 30 days down to a matter of minutes and
provided the ability to receive digital copies of decision
letters.
The G.I. Bill has been assisting veterans for nearly 79
years. Now through automation, we are helping applicants start
their educational journeys faster than ever.
We are also providing schools modernized claims
capabilities. School certifying officials, or SCOs, are the
front door for veterans to continue and complete their
educational goals. To better serve the SCOs, we introduced
Enrollment Manager which streamlines the process to submit
enrollments for students. More than 15,000 SCOs have accessed
Enrollment Manager since launch and the new system has reduced
the number of steps to enter in a new enrollment to as few as
five clicks. Already more than 1.4 million enrollments have
been submitted. Most importantly, SCOs now have more time to
focus on what matters most, helping veterans, service members,
and their families meet and exceed their educational goals.
Last, modernizing legacy systems. With streamlined VA
processes and our new technology platform, we have achieved a
99.99 percent system availability rate for claims processing.
We are also helping VA decommission antiquated legacy IT
systems to improve the speed and accuracy of its educational
claims processes. We have retired two of the three legacy
systems and have exceeded DGIB's 3-year IT infrastructure
reduction targets.
Now, large complex programs have enormous dependencies both
within and external to the program. Recognizing this, VA and
Accenture Federal have established governance processes to
quickly identify risks and assess impacts. Together, VA and
Accenture Federal have continued to make progress on DGIB
milestones, while jointly working through options to address
gaps in dependencies. We are actively engaged with VA to re-
plan future releases to outline potential options for a path
forward, while continuing to fulfill program commitments. Our
partnership with VA can continue to provide world class
modernized services to veteran beneficiaries. We can do this by
deploying future capabilities like approval manager, workload
manager, and benefits manager, which will replace aging legacy
systems with modern technologies and digital experiences.
In conclusion, we remain steadfast in our commitment to
make a dramatic difference in the lives of hundreds of
thousands of veterans, service members, and their families.
Through the use of innovative technologies, we are
strengthening the foundation that provides agile rapid
deployments, improved automation, and enhanced data insight. We
are proud to help the VA bring to life its truly bold DGIB
vision and to focus on delivering the best outcomes for
veterans and for the American taxpayer.
Thank you and I look forward to your questions.
[The Prepared Statement Of Kyle Michl Appears In The
Appendix]
Mr. Van Orden. Mr. Michl, thank you very much for your
testimony.
Your written statement will be now entered into the record.
The subcommittee will now recess so that the members can go
vote and we expect to return 10 minutes following the last
vote. Mr. Garcia, I recommend that you bring a lunch. Okay?
[Recess]
Mr. Van Orden. The subcommittee will come to order.
We are going to proceed to questions and I am going to ask
members and witnesses to respect the 5 minute rule. I talked
about that earlier, so I am not asking anymore, I am telling
you. I will hold myself accountable to the same timeline.
I now recognize myself for 5 minutes.
Mr. Garcia, can you give us a date when the Digital G.I.
Bill project will resume and when the release six is scheduled?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir. Thank you for that question.
We are going through a contact modification with AFS.
Mr. Van Orden. Mr. Garcia, I am going to be short with you.
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir.
Mr. Van Orden. I expect you to be short with me. I asked
you for a date and not a process. They have got this thing that
is called the calendar, and I want you to be able to put your
finger on it and tell me a date. Can you do that?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, yes. The release six is Enterprise
Management Payment Workload and Reporting (eMPWR). That is the
next major release. That is the financial system update within
BDN.
Mr. Van Orden. Mr. Garcia, that as a process, not a date? I
am asking you a very clear question, what date? Put your finger
on a calendar and let us stop this buffoonery.
Mr. Garcia. Summer of 24 for release six.
Mr. Van Orden. Okay. That is a season, not a date, Mr.
Garcia. What is the date that this will be released?
Mr. Garcia. I cannot give you a date beyond that.
Mr. Van Orden. Okay. That is unacceptable. Mr. Garcia, do
you read the newspaper? Do you read the newspaper?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir. Everyday.
Mr. Van Orden. Okay. Do you remember that article that came
out that said Visa went out of business? No, because you did
not read it because it did not happen. It did not happen
because Visa is a company and it is predicated on merit. If
Visa all of a sudden could not process over 200,000 of their
bills, and then eventually, what, 4,000 at some point, what
would happen to the person that was responsible at Visa in
about, I do not know, 6 minutes? What would happen to that
person, Mr. Garcia? Could you posit it? They would be fired.
They would be kicked to the curb because they were not serving
their customers. You use that word when you are speaking about
my fellow veterans, you call them customers. The person at
Visa, if they failed objectively, like you have--because it is
not the VA, man, you are the VA. It says it right there--if
they failed like that, they would be fired. Why are you still
getting a paycheck? Can you answer that question, Mr. Garcia?
Should you be held to the same standard as a civilian company
that is processing things that you buy at Walmart when you are
talking about the lives of veterans? I have gone through every
single education program that you have, Mr. Mueller, all of
them. You, Mr. Garcia, need to justify to us why you are
getting a paycheck. Can you do that, sir?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir. I would like to do that.
Mr. Van Orden. Hit it. I am going to give you 50 seconds. I
want 1 minute to close. Hit it. You are on.
Mr. Garcia. I started on 1 August 2022.
Mr. Van Orden. Okay.
Mr. Garcia. Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program
(VRRAP), right, was at 54 percent obligation in August 22.
Through my efforts--Mr. Levin can recognize this--by December
when the program ended with a 99 percent. I do not call that
failure, sir, I call that supporting the veteran. As I was a
student veteran, I would not be here with the G.I. Bill. Eight
years enlisted time, got out, finished my program, getting the
G.I. Bill. Customers are important to me. Higher ed, I was in
higher ed 10 years before I came to this position. I know SCOs,
sir. I listened to them.
The successful roll-out of Enrollment Manager, because I
put a priority on it. I know the SCOs. They used to work for
me. I listen to them. As I listen to veterans as well.
Mr. Van Orden. Very well.
Thank you, Mr. Garcia.
Here is the problem. Are you confident, Mr. Garcia--can you
please tell me again what percentage of original claims you
have automated last month?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, varies by date--by day----
Mr. Van Orden. Percentage of claims you have automated last
month. Can you answer that question, sir?
Mr. Garcia. In the 15 to 20 percent range because it varies
by day.
Mr. Van Orden. Okay. That is a 20 percent variance, and
that is unacceptable, Mr. Garcia.
You have to understand that the reason that these things
are not working is because we have the VA, which is a group and
agency, and we have processes. We do not have people. That does
not fly. Mr. Garcia, I am holding you personally accountable
for this, personally accountable for this.
I want to say one more thing my--and time as expired. I
will get you in the second round. I yield back. I now recognize
the ranking member, Mr. Levin, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Levin. I thank the chairman. I would like to associate
myself with the chairman's request for specific timeline. In
fact, in my open, I had mentioned, I think, six additional
releases. I see in the majority's timeline here, release six,
seven, eight, nine. I think there are a ten, eleven, and a
twelve. It would be very helpful to us. I appreciate all the
work, obviously, that you are doing, but it would be very
helpful to us that to be able to put specific dates against
those releases and then be able to measure over time and make
sure that those dates are being hit.
I Wanted to follow up also on the chairman's question about
automation. In your testimony, I saw current percentage of
57.38. How do you explain that it is not higher than that after
the time that you have had? How are we going to get from 57.38
to 70, 80, 90? What do you need to make that happen?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, when the program started, we were at
around the 35, 37 percent range. We are pushing 60 percent, so
that is an increase of 25 percent.
One of the things that we are working on, for example, is
with DoD on the system called VA DOD Identity Repository
(VADIR). It is what comes over from the Pentagon into our
system. We have been having good progress meetings lately over
the last several months to make sure that information that came
here was accurate. We do not want to put in an automated system
inaccurate information that creates inaccurate payments, right.
The off ramping that occurs from automation is when the data is
not accurate coming in. We are making progress with DoD.
Mr. Levin. I appreciate that. Unfortunately, we have
limited time.
Can I get your commitment that you will give us a date
certain or at least an estimated date certain of when we can
get to hit 70, 80, 90, 100 percent? Can you give us that table?
Mr. Garcia. We progress----
Mr. Levin. That is pretty simple, yes or no.
Mr. Garcia. We are committed to higher automation and
originals and supplementals, yes, sir.
Mr. Levin. You cannot give us a specific timetable on when
you are going to be able to hit those higher numbers?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, it depends on the off ramping.
Mr. Levin. Okay. Can you give us a specific timeline that
fills in some of the blanks of this chart when you are going to
hit release six, seven, eight, nine, and so forth?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, it does depend on the contract
modification. We have got to get through that and that in turn
would set the new schedule. We can say, release six is in the
summer timeframe.
Mr. Levin. Sir, I am trying to work with you here. I think
it would be very helpful to everybody on this committee if you
would at least commit to giving us some specifics with regard
to dates and times as it pertains to releases and as it
pertains to the automation frame work. Can you commit to that?
Mr. Garcia. In the best that I can, sir.
Mr. Levin. Okay. Well, our staff will be following up with
yours, but I think it really would be helpful for us to
understand how these investments are being implemented and how
these metrics are being achieved.
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir.
Mr. Levin. In March, hundreds of thousands of veterans were
at risk of not receiving their housing payments due to a
processing failure tied to Digital G.I. Bill release five.
Mr. Garcia, I will start with you, and I want to give time
for Mr. Michl as well. What steps are you now taking in light
of that failure to ensure the future releases do not cause
similar unforeseen errors?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir. There was a dependency that was
created for the BDN system to be online and the system did not
catch the dependency of when that occurred. The system just
froze, the payment queue did not go forward. We immediately
responded to that. Payments did go out for 278,000 Electronic
Funds Transfer (EFT) recipients, 4,000 paper checks went out
the next day. We fixed that problem with AFS. We now have
robust monitoring that occurs every month. I get daily inputs
that last week, that tracks across the cycle, payment queue,
payment run, and we have full confidence that will not happen
again.
Mr. Levin. That is good to hear.
Mr. Michl, anything you would like to add?
Mr. Michl. I would say we certainly recognize that there
was an issue there and worked together quickly to make sure
that we got payments out that very same day, and payments out
overall in the timeframe which typically go out.
With regards to making sure that this does not occur in the
future, we have certainly put a number of processes in place to
look at functional counts and share that with the broader
stakeholder community to make sure that we have full and
complete visibility to any issues that may occur, and make sure
that we have the opportunity to address issues as they arise.
Mr. Levin. I appreciate that. That is certainly all on the
record now. We are going to hold you to it.
Again, as I said at the outset, I think there were so many
problems with G.I. Bill technology, and it is encouraging to
hear of your progress, but help us say nice things about your
work by providing us with specifics, specific dates, specific
progress that you are making, and I think that would go a long
way.
I will yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, Ranking Member Levin.
I now recognize Mr. Mrvan from Indiana for 5 minutes, sir.
Mr. Mrvan. Mr. Garcia, considering the VA's history of
budget overruns in IT projects, what concrete actions are being
taken to prevent excessive spending and ensure that the Digital
G.I. Bill modernization efforts stay within budget?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, I would say two quick points. The
governance structure that we have has become more robust over
time. We have the right leadership in place for the executive
steering committee, for example. On a day to day basis, we have
program governance that I help lead with my partners at this
table. Governance have been improved. We are also standing up--
or increasing the Project Management Office (PMO) that works
directly for me. It has been in place, but we are adding more
Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) and more capability to it,
partnering with MITRE at the table as well. I think improved
governance and the PMO office that helps with that program
oversight, including the budget part of it, is how we are doing
that.
Mr. Mrvan. One of the pieces of legislation that I have
proposed is an acquisition review board that would allow for
the ability to look at projects as they are being enacted, as
they are being instituted. What is your opinion of that?
Mr. Garcia. Sir what was the term called again?
Mr. Mrvan. It is an Acquisition Review Board.
Mr. Garcia. Oh, the ARB.
Mr. Mrvan. Yes.
Mr. Mrvan. Sir, I think that is a good idea. As to
governance, I defer to some of my partners to maybe add to that
as well.
Mr. Mrvan. We can stop there. I just wanted to know what
your opinion was.
Mr. Garcia. Okay.
Mr. Mrvan. With that, I will yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it greatly.
I recognize Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Oh my gosh, I was
thinking you are--I am sorry--McCormick for 5 minutes.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.
This question is for Mr. Orifici--I hope I got that right.
For the most part, modernization of the Digital G.I. Bill
system has been seamless and has avoided the pitfalls that VA's
other IT modernization efforts have faced. What are some of the
lessons learned from these efforts?
Mr. Orifici. Thank you for that question, ranking member.
I have actually come up in the education programs on the IT
side through some of the failures and the successes that we are
having here. I have gotten to experience many of the aspects of
the failed IT and the successful programs. We have had a very
collaborative environment between education service and Office
of Information and Technology (OIT) and our vendors, that lets
us communicate very regularly in terms of what work needs to be
done, what the risks and issues are, and really be able to
collaborate closely in terms of what progress needs to be made
and what actions need to be taken. I think a large part of the
success in the education space has been that close
collaboration between the business, IT, and the vendors to make
things successful.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. How can the VA transfer best
practices and lessons learned from the modernization effort and
duplicate it success in other VA programs?
Mr. Orifici. Also a very good question.
I am now in a larger role than I have been previously going
through this and we are looking at the lessons learned and how
we have done and been able to achieve the successes within this
program and looking to see what we can then apply to the other
areas than the benefits portfolio. We also worked very closely
with our Chief Information Officer (CIO) on a regular basis
with this program and he has very close to oversight of what we
are doing here to apply those lessons more broadly across OIT.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. The committee has heard from
numerous witnesses on the issues and incompatibilities between
VA and DoD systems. What are the largest challenges in
integrating DoD and VA systems?
Mr. Orifici. I will start that question then I will turn
that over to Joe.
One of the challenges that we have is that there is very
specific qualities around especially training data and around
some the collection of data from all the branches of service as
we look to automate the claims process. As we get into the
collection of this data and making sure that we are having the
quality data there, we have had to work with the data groups on
the DoD side, and they have been very collaborative with us in
correcting and working with us to bring this data across. It is
really been making sure that we collect all the data that is
needed to be able disqualify training periods and other type of
information like that to make sure that those claims move
forward.
Mr. Garcia.
Mr. Garcia. Ma'am, that again is a very good question
because the data comes over from DoD and it enters our system.
We have had great progress working with our partners. We had a
meeting with them where we specifically identified the quick
wins that we could get. A lot of it is Guard reserve time,
service academies, how they have their obligations set up. We
were very clear on what we needed, and our counterpart is
working with the Services to make sure that we get that
information that we need. I am very pleased with the progress
that we are making and will continue to make with our DoD
partners.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Thank you.
Well, that takes me to my question for you, Mr. Garcia.
As with any technology modernization program, our main
concern regarding potential vendor lock. The prime contractor,
Accenture, indicated that it has used several proprietary
technologies in a system which may hamper VA's ability to
modify, upkeep, and enhance systems. Is this a concern of VA?
Mr. Garcia. Proprietary.
Mr. Orifici. Proprietary. The----
Mr. Van Orden. Please suspend the gentlelady's time until
you guys get your act together.
Mr. Orifici. I am sorry, sir. He has the hearing--it is not
working for him, so he has a hard time hearing the questions.
Mr. Van Orden. That is a very reasonable excuse.
Mr. Garcia. Is this Intellectual Property (IP)?
Mr. Van Orden. Are you prepared to answer the question?
Mr. Orifici. They are concerned about the vendor lock and
the IP. Yes, IP.
Mr. Garcia. Social properties?
Mr. Orifici. Yes.
Mr. Garcia. Sorry, ma'am. We are working on the
intellectual property. Is that the question, ma'am?
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Mm-hmm. On the vendor lock.
Mr. Garcia. Yes. We are working to include that in the
modification of the contract.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. What steps are you taking?
Mr. Orifici. Yes, so Mr. DelBene is very concerned about
the intellectual property and how this moves forward. Part of
the negotiations that we are entering with the vendor is how we
handle the transition of IP into the VA to ensure that we
minimize any impact of vendor lock around the intellectual
property and the proprietary software.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, madam.
I recognize Ms. Ramirez from Illinois for 5 minutes.
Ms. Ramirez. Thank you, Chairman Van Orden, Chairman
Rosendale, Ranking Member Levin, and Ranking Member Cherfilus-
McCormick, for holding today's hearing and reviewing this
digital bill program, G.I. Bill program.
As you may know, you have probably heard me talk before
about a bill that I introduced here in Congress, H.R. 1767. It
is the Student Veteran Benefit Restoration Act. This bill in
essence would restore G.I. Bill benefits to student veterans
who have been defrauded by education institutions. As you can
imagine, ensuring that the technological upgrades to the system
used to administer the G.I. Bill benefits is really important
to me. I want to make sure it works.
This question is for Mr. Garcia. What steps is the VA and
relevant departments taking to ensure that one H.R. 1767--
because I am being positive about it being signed into law--
what steps are you taking in the Enrollment Manager platform to
make sure we have the capacity to handle a possible influx in
claims?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, ma'am.
Part of the efforts that we do is legislative changes that
we need to do. We have office within education service that
actually works on that to make sure that we take that new
legislation, work with our partners to make sure that is
integrated into, for example, the digital GIB platform moving
forward. That is important that we do.
Ms. Ramirez. Got it. I just want to reiterate, I think you
heard it from Chairman Van Orden, you heard it from Ranking
Member Levin, I mean, I think we all want to see a timeline
that we are going to be able to count on in this fifth
iteration of the modernization of the program. It is critical
to all of us. I want to just make sure I say that on record.
I have just a few more questions for you, and then I am
going to yield back.
Does the VA plan to request increased funding to the Office
of Information and Technology for educational services? Yes or
no?
Mr. Garcia. That is OIT funding so, Robert, can you answer
that?
Mr. Orifici. At this time, we do not plan to ask for
additional funding for OIT for this program, and that will be
based--that may change based off any negotiations with vendor.
Ms. Ramirez. Got it. Can the VA say that there will be no
processing delays in the future as we wrap up what will be
maybe the fifth iteration?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, ma'am. We do not want any more delays.
Ms. Ramirez. Yes. I just, again, I want to reiterate what
you heard here today. We know that you are working really hard
and we want to make sure that we have the systems in place to
ensure that above all we are centering everything we do on our
veterans and making sure that they have the resources they
need, they are able to process their benefits as soon as
possible, and that we do not look back and repeat the same
thing we have seen in the past.
I am going to take your word that you are doing everything
in your hands to ensure that summer 2024 date comes to a
concrete date and that we could all be celebrating, we are
moving forward, and we have progress.
Thank you.
With that, I yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, Ms. Ramirez.
I recognize Mr. Self from the great State of Texas for 5
minutes.
Mr. Self. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Mueller, I heard you say earlier about the noble work--
VA does noble work. We are not here today to question the
nobleness of your work, we are here to see if we can make it
more efficient.
Mr. Garcia, you have a very impressive resume, 28 years in
the Air Force. You assumed leadership just over a year ago, and
you have written on leadership, you have taught leadership, and
you assumed the leadership of this program almost a year ago.
Is that right?
Mr. Garcia. August 1st. Yes, sir.
Mr. Self. August 1st.
Mr. Garcia. Going on a year.
Mr. Self. Going on a year. Very close to it. Since you took
the leadership of this program, we have come up with this
delay. First question is, to what do you attribute the delay? I
may have missed it while I was out on the floor, but the bottom
line, if you will.
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir. That is a very good question, sir.
Part of the delay is getting it right, right. We want to
make sure, we want to build on the success that I have heard
people recognize, do right for our veterans, and be good
stewards, right. The delay, sir, I think, comes down to new
information that we got about the runway that we now have. BDN
shut down, the benefit delivery network system, was originally
going to shut down, be unavailable September of this year. That
compressed the time schedule, right. Now we know it is next of
2 years of runway. We were able to use that runway to move
Enrollment Manager, for example, for the school's certifying
officials. It has been a great program, 1.4 million enrollment
certifications. It has been a much better program because we
moved it to the right. That is an example of how we are trying
to make sure we take advantage of the agile capacity with
additional runway.
Mr. Self. You talked about how it compressed the timeline
and yet then you have a longer runway. I am not sure I
understand that. We do not need to go into it.
Once you identified the delay, how often do you
personally--because we are talking about at least a billion
dollar program here over the decade, at least a billion dollar
program--how often do you personally chair meetings to make
sure this moves as fast as it can? You personally.
Mr. Garcia. Sir, Digital G.I. Bill is the highest priority
for me. It takes up every part of my day. In the governance
structure we have meetings with our partners twice a week. I
have their cell phone number. I talked to them nighttime,
weekends to make sure the program is moving forward. We set up
a project modernization office, PMO, in my office working
directly for me now. That is a change that I made. It was not
working for me before. The PMO works for me. I talked to that
person daily. It is a daily effort working with this
modernization forward.
Mr. Self. Okay. Have you had this large of a project
management project before?
Mr. Garcia. I have been involved with projects like this,
sir, after I retired I worked for a consulting firm. The
Pentagon has some modernization projects. I did not lead them,
but I was part of them.
Mr. Self. Mm-hmm. Okay. What are you going to do--Congress
is concerned about the length of time. I do not accept these
delays at face value. What are you doing to compress the time,
to use your expression.
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir.
Mr. Self. Do you just accept your contractor's statement
that it is going to take that long? Because leadership, in and
of its essence, is to get the most out of the people under you.
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir. I agree. I do that for our staff, and
I work collaboratively with our vendors to move the program
forward. I commit to continue doing that.
Mr. Self. Do you see any possibility to compress the
timeline, to use your phrase?
Mr. Garcia. We want to make sure we do it right, sir. It is
a lot of testing that needs to occur. We do not want to be too
fast. We want to make sure that the veterans get their
benefits, again, as I got when I was the veteran, that the
payments are accurate, for example. We do not want to speed so
much that we get it wrong. I think we should be deliberate to
make sure these major releases that come forward are done
right.
Mr. Self. Are your contractors working 24/7 on this?
Mr. Garcia. I call them at all hours of the day and night.
Mr. Self. The testing--and this may be for one of you other
gentlemen--is the testing occurring--because this is an IT
system, is the testing occurring 24/7?
Mr. Michl. I will take that, sir. As we go through test
cycles, we have different phases----
Mr. Van Orden. The gentleman's time has expired.
We are going to move to a second round of questioning.
Before we do so, Mr. Garcia, is your hearing--is your device
working?
Mr. Garcia. The device is not working well, sir.
Mr. Van Orden. Okay. I would like to take a brief recess
now if you want to work on that because I really want you to be
able to hear what we are saying. Is that all right? All right,
we will take a brief recess.
Mr. Garcia, just give a heads up.
[Recess]
Mr. Van Orden. I apologize for this, Mr. Garcia. That
technology was issued to you by this committee and that is not
your fault, that is ours. That will not happen again. I am
going to knock you when you are not doing good stuff and I am
going to knock us we do not do good stuff either. What is good
for the goose is good for the gander.
We will proceed now to a second round of questioning and I
recognize myself for 5 minutes.
Mr. Garcia, previous to this committee hearing, when you
guys were informed--I said this earlier, you were informed over
a month ago that you were going to come here and sit here, and
we did not get data, this stuff, from you until last night. 20
years in the Air Force, did a bunch of other stuff. Were an
officer or an enlisted guy? Were you an officer or enlisted?
Mr. Garcia. Both. Eight years enlisted, 20 years
commissioned.
Mr. Van Orden. Okay. What pay grade were you using enlisted
guy? What did you get up to?
Mr. Garcia. E-5 after 8 years, and then I got out and
became a lieutenant colonel after 20.
Mr. Van Orden. Then you went bad. Just kidding. I am an
enlisted guy. Okay. When you were a lieutenant colonel, if you
told your lieutenant or whatever, hey, man, we are going to get
together a month from now and I want you to have pretty much
every pertinent document you could think to make sure that your
lieutenant will be able to inform me what is going on. The
lieutenant that worked for you, Lieutenant Colonel Garcia,
waited until the night before to give you preparatory material,
what type of conversation would you have with that lieutenant,
Mr. Garcia?
Mr. Garcia. In fairness, I normally try and ask what was
the situation that led to that first?
Mr. Van Orden. Okay, Mr. Garcia. What is the situation that
led to the fact that you guys could not give us the pertinent
documents that are super duper important for us to find out
until 12 hours before hearing when you were informed 5 weeks
ago.
Mr. Garcia. Sir, I am not sure what document you are
referring to.
Mr. Van Orden. Well, this thing with all the budget and how
much money he spent and everything. The $377,508,587.47, which
is approximately 20 percent of the $1.3 to $1.96 billion you
will be expending of taxpayers' dollars for something that may
or may not work.
Mr. Garcia. Sir, if that got to you late then, that is my
responsibility. I do accept that.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you very much.
These guys came into my office and we talked about this
stuff ahead of time. To the knowledge of this committee, your
group of folks that work for you have never reached out to this
committee staff. I know you have certainly not reached out to
my office to discuss any of these things previously, so we
could have taken care of some of this and moved the ball
forward. To me, it seems that if the vendor, which these guys
proactively reached out to my office because they know I am the
chairman of the subcommittee and they want to talk through some
things in detail because I only give myself 5 minutes to talk
and you have not done it, that is telling me that they are
trying and you are not. That is a factual statement. I would
like to see you more engaged in this program.
My colleague, who had to step back to the floor, Mr. Self,
is a retired special forces colonel, and these things do not
fly with us. They do not. If you are responsible, Mr. Garcia,
you are responsible.
Mr. Michl, what is included in the next phase of this
project? Is the code actually written for the project already,
and how long has it been ready, if it is, and what do you think
the holdup is to implement this? Is the code written? If it is,
right, how long has it been written, and then what is the hold
up for getting it going?
Mr. Michl. Thank you for the question, sir.
The majority of the capabilities for release six are
written. The next phases will be to test that and then
ultimately to deploy that. There are some additional
requirements that will likely require development. There will
be some additional code. That is why I said the majority, sir.
Mr. Van Orden. Okay. When did the majority of this get
written? When is it finished so that you could start your
testing phase?
Mr. Michl. It was finished in the in the early spring, sir.
Mr. Van Orden. Of this year.
Mr. Michl. Yes, sir.
Mr. Van Orden. What is the holdup?
Mr. Michl. There are a number of dependencies to enable
testing. Some of that includes the environments that are
necessary for that. In order to test an application of this
type with the complex data----
Mr. Van Orden. Has anybody said go? Is anybody like go, Mr.
Michl, run free. Have they done that?
Mr. Michl. No, sir. We continue to make progress.
Mr. Van Orden. Hold on, hold on. I got 35 seconds.
Mr. Michl, who is the person that says go, launch, execute,
proceed, sir? Who should be saying--a person--who should be
saying that to you? Not an environment or process, blah, blah,
blah. Who has to say, hit it, Kyle?
Mr. Michl. We get approval from Mr. Garcia to move forward
with testing.
Mr. Van Orden. We are waiting for Mr. Garcia to tell you to
launch something that is already written and paid for and Mr.
Garcia has not told you that yet, is that correct?
Mr. Michl. We have certainly had discussions about what is
in front of us.
Mr. Van Orden. That is a yes or no answer.
Mr. Michl. There is a lot of complexity----
Mr. Van Orden. My time has expired and the answer is no.
I now yield back and I recognize the ranking member, Mr.
Levin, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Levin. I thank the chairman again.
Wanted to relay some questions from students. These are
actual questions from students. Hopefully that will yield your
attention.
One of these questions was do all school certifying
officials have access to Enrollment Manager or have there been
any issues preventing access? Mr. Garcia, you seem to be on the
hot spot today, so I will go with you.
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir.
Over 15,000 have access to Enrollment Manager and those
that could not, we try to get--we got in the system. There
might have been some ID.me credential issues, but we believe
that they are in that need to get in.
Mr. Levin. To your knowledge, there are not any issues
preventing access at this time?
Mr. Garcia. Not that I am aware of, sir.
Mr. Levin. Okay. We will follow up.
We also heard that the Enrollment Manager might not have
the best accessibility for those who are visually impaired. Can
you commit to look into that and fix any issues with regard to
accessibility?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir. We can look into that.
Mr. Levin. Thank you. Specifically, we are hearing about
the inability to increase the font size and things like that. I
am sure there would be plenty of follow-up for that.
Then third, what is the downtime when Enrollment Manager
shut down during the typical duty day?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, I defer to my OIT person on that, please.
Mr. Orifici. I am not aware of downtime for Enrollment
Manager during the daytime, and I would defer to a Accenture if
there is any additional metrics around downtime for Enrollment
Manager.
Mr. Michl. I am not aware of specific downtime associated
with enrolment manager. There are certain processes that depend
on systems downstream that might be delayed, but that should be
not apparent to the user.
Mr. Levin. Okay. If we get you in touch with that specific
person who had the question, can you commit to addressing their
concern about this?
Mr. Michl. Yes. I would be happy to look into it, sir.
Mr. Levin. Terrific. I appreciate that.
No further questions, and I will yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, Mr. Levin. I appreciate it
greatly.
I now recognize Mr. Rosendale from the great state of--
where are you from anyway--I am just kidding--Montana.
Mr. Rosendale. Montana.
Mr. Van Orden. I know you are from Montana. It is good to
have you here.
Mr. Rosendale. The treasure state.
Mr. Van Orden. It is the treasure state. Mr. Rosendale.
Mr. Rosendale. Thank you all for your patience. Obviously,
we all have a lot of things going on. There is business on the
floor today I had to participate in. I am glad to be back.
Thank you very much. This is important work.
If the next release happens next summer, next rollout, that
represents a 1-year delay in what we have been doing here. Mr.
Garcia, we are 2 years into the DGIB program. It has produced
significant accomplishments, as I have referenced in my opening
remarks, but the current struggles are frustrating and
baffling. Let us get right down to the root cause of this. What
caused the next release to change and to be delayed?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, the next release, release six, is eMPWR.
That is the financial system that is on the schedule. We do
need, as Mr. Michl said, the test environment properly to get
that properly tested, make sure it is done right. We have that
coming, and so that influenced when that could roll out. I
would commit to the early summer timeframe for that next major
release of eMPWR, which is the financial system upgrade.
Mr. Rosendale. Mr. Michl, let me ask you, what are you
waiting for? We just heard that Mr. Garcia has to give you the
authority to move forward. What do you need in order to do next
rollout?
Mr. Michl. In order to complete the next rollout we need to
have the availability of the test environment that Mr. Garcia
just mentioned, we need to have clarity on what requirements
are in that release. There is a few additional items to be
clarified, and we need to have a contractual path to enable
that.
Mr. Rosendale. Okay. Mr. Garcia, who do you need to get
that information from and why is it taking so long to get it?
Mr. Garcia. We put a team together, acquisitions, OIT, in
house, and VBA to figure the best course of action. We have
that final decision made. Now we are moving out. Next 30 days,
we are going to develop the terms, 30 days to negotiate, and
hopefully by early, mid September, we will have a contract
modified with AFS to continue progressing with the next major
release.
Mr. Rosendale. Are you saying that there is another
contractor involved or are you going to be negotiating back
with Accenture?
Mr. Garcia. Accenture.
Mr. Rosendale. Okay. If you are providing the information,
why are you not able to get the information that they need?
Where is that coming from in order to authorize them to
continue their work?
Mr. Garcia. Well, we need to modify the contract, right,
because then we need to set the priorities, do the
deliverables, there is things we want to do with that modified
contract that is necessary to trigger the next steps.
Mr. Rosendale. Do you have the information that is
necessary to deliver that to Mr. Michl right now, Accenture
right now so that you could proceed with this work?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, I believe most of the requirements are
done. There is----
Mr. Rosendale. If you have the information available to
you, are you telling me it is going to take you a year to
negotiate a contract and be able to authorize Mr. Michl to do
this work?
Mr. Garcia. No, sir, I did not say it would take a year. I
am saying by September, we will have the modified contract in
place for them to continue with release six. They cannot do it
in 2 or 3 months.
Mr. Rosendale. Mr. Michl, if you get the authorization in
September to proceed with version six rollout, are you saying
that it is going to take you until next summer to roll it out?
The information I have is that it is going to be until next
summer. Unless somebody said something in the room while I was
gone.
Mr. Michl. Yes, sir. You know, certainly it depends on the
final outcomes, but that is a reasonable timeframe given what
we know today.
Mr. Rosendale. Mr. Michl, how much of the software in the
next release is already completed and what is left to do?
Mr. Michl. The majority is complete.
Mr. Rosendale. Okay. If the majority of the software is
completed--I must be missing something--if the majority of the
software is completed, you have the information that is
available to you and you just need to finish up a contract, I
do not understand why we are talking about next year before
this can be rolled out. Somebody please enlighten me.
Mr. Michl.
Mr. Michl. When we look at the deployments for the system,
there is a small number of windows across the year where we can
deploy. If you think about Enrollment Manager, we want to make
sure we are not deploying things during a time of high
enrollment.
Mr. Rosendale. Okay.
Mr. Michl. There is approximately 14 out of 52 weeks of the
year that we can deploy. You take that into consideration.
There is also a need to go and test thoroughly, as you heard
Mr. Garcia say, and those test cycles are months long. They
take a substantial amount of time to make sure that we get this
right. You add those together, along with the time to move
forward on potentially new requirements, that is where the
summer of 2024 comes----
Mr. Rosendale. Okay. If we have the information available,
you have the software that is available, you have to have a
little bit of time to go ahead and test it, 30 days to test
your software out. You say the software is just about complete.
Then we are looking at--we are trying to find a window of time
when we do not have a large enrolment, then that would be
December-January, during which you are not having enrolment
time. It would seem to me that that would be when we could roll
this out.
Mr. Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you very much.
I now recognize Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick for 5 minutes.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We are aware that the G.I. Bill benefits change
periodically as Congress provides for new benefits. In the past
we have seen technology delays or otherwise create problems in
the delivery of these benefits.
Mr. Garcia, how can the VA ensure that the new system is
this is as future proof as possible.
Mr. Garcia. I am sorry, ma'am. How do we ensure future
proof, ma'am? How do you define future proof?
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Making sure that we are avoided
the obstacles and the pitfalls from the past.
Mr. Garcia. Avoiding obstacles? Yes, ma'am. I think that
goes back to the governance structure that we have in place
with the right people at the right time. We meet constantly,
again, OIT, other players at this table. The governance
structure is very important, right. It is the oversight from
senior levels and then program governance is occurring. The PMO
office that works for me also ensures the oversight that we
continue moving forward. It is governance and the PMO office
that we are increasing the staffing for.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. My question then is for Mr.
Orifici.
What specific steps are being taking organizationally and
technologically to ensure longevity?
Mr. Orifici. Yes. Thank you for that question. A big part
of what we are trying to do is eliminate the 22 legacy systems
that supported education benefits at the start of this process.
To date, we have eliminated two and we have plans over the
course of this effort to decommission all but two of the
systems that currently support education system and move them
onto this modern platform. All of the systems that support
education service will be on modern technology. They will no
longer be sitting on 50 year old COBOL programs.
In that effort, we should be able to continue to modernize
and keep the systems current with today's technology.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Thank you.
Mr. Mueller, other technology modernization efforts at the
VA have struggled with change management and communication. Has
MITRE or the VA measured the success of these functions in the
Digital G.I. Bill program? If so, how was it measured?
Mr. Mueller. We have not measured the functions, but we are
supporting the PMO in that space to develop organizational
change and stakeholder engagement plans.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Are you using any variables to
measure success?
Mr. Mueller. We will be developing those measures as the
PMO continues to mature.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. As of right now, do you know what
variables you might consider in and what is the delivery date
for those variables?
Mr. Mueller. I will take that back and get back----
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. My next question for you then is
where are there are lessons learned regarding change management
or communication that can be shared with the rest of the VA
modernization efforts?
Mr. Mueller. At MITRE we actually have an innovation center
that is focused on this space that we--and they work across our
sponsor base across the Federal Government. We bring those
lessons learned when we develop the plans that we work with
this sponsor, with the VA on. That is how we bring that
information back.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. What are a few of those lessons
learned specifically?
Mr. Mueller. I would have to get back to you to get
specifics, but proactive engagement. I would start with that,
proactive engagement, constant communication.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. Okay. As we are moving forward,
what was that delivery date? We want to make sure that we have
full implementation success and that we are measuring what is
going forward. Do you know when you will have those variables
and those lessons learned compiled and put together?
Mr. Mueller. I will have to get back to you on the specific
date.
Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick. All right.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, ma'am.
We will proceed to a third round of questioning and I
recognize myself for 5 minutes.
Mr. Michl, there are 14 out of 52 weeks where you can
implement this. Is this correct?
Mr. Michl. Optimal weeks for deployment, sir, yes.
Mr. Van Orden. Right on. Do you have those like blocked off
on a calendar?
Mr. Michl. We do have versions of calendars for those.
Mr. Van Orden. Have you given a copy of that to Mr. Garcia?
Mr. Michl. We have a road map, but it is probably not
identified clearly. We could share----
Mr. Van Orden. Okay. Let us solve some problems here. Let
us pretend like we are all enlisted people still. Sorry, Mr.
Garcia. I want you to get a calendar, I want you to block off
14 out of 52 weeks where you can implement this and I want you
to hand deliver to Mr. Garcia. Mr. Garcia, that is going to
help you narrow down so you can answer my ranking member's
question. You will be able to put your finger on this. I want
to know when it is going to happen, because this is, again,
completely unacceptable.
Are you familiar with the POA and M? Did you guys use that
in the Air Force? Did you? You know what that stands for? Plans
of Actions and Milestones. It is the way that you mission plan
so that you kill terrorists because your guys are trained and
women are trained and equipped and they are ready to go. Do you
have the plans and actions of milestones developed for this
program, which is going to cost over a billion, gazillion--I do
not even know how much money it is going to cost. Do you have a
written plan of action and milestone? Do you?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, it is in the integrated master schedule
for the releases.
Mr. Van Orden. If you have an integrated master schedule
then either you have been disingenuous with me or it is a bad
schedule, because if you have a schedule, sir, that means you
have a calendar. If you have a calendar, you have dates on it.
I am going to keep harping on this.
Okay. If you have time, Kyle, I would appreciate it, 14
weeks out of 52. Use a highlighter. Hand them to that dude. Mr.
Garcia, I want you to put your finger on one of those weeks for
us, and I want you to give it to this guy and to me. We are not
doing this anymore. We are not doing bureaucratic gobbledygook
and all that. We are not doing that.
Veterans risk their lives for us, as you did. They have
earned these education benefits. They are not a gift. They will
be able to exercise them and they are not going to have to
worry about paying their rent because your 40 year old
antiquated system does not work and you cannot tell me when the
new one is going to come in. This is unacceptable and it will
not be tolerated.
Mr. Garcia, it is you, it is not the Veterans
Administration, it is not a process or an organization, it is
you as an individual. I respect your service as a lieutenant
colonel. You are a Mustang--that is what we call them in the
Navy. I respect that. With that respect comes responsibility
and you are responsible. With responsibility comes
accountability, and we are holding you accountable today. Is
that crystal clear, Mr. Garcia?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir, it is.
Mr. Van Orden. I appreciate that greatly.
Mr. Mueller, you guys are really quiet. I am sorry. I guess
I do not know if you are happy or not that you are not getting
drilled. I do not know. It is on either side of the fence.
Mr. Mueller, in 2018 one of the recommendations of your
company was made to ensure that success of this project, which
clearly it has not been successful, was that the VA appoint a
specific person, like by name, one person, one stop shop, who
would be held accountable to shepherd this project, to champion
it. Was that recommendation taken on board?
Mr. Mueller. Thank you for the question.
Specific to that 2018 International Trade Administration
(ITA) recommendation, that was for the Forever G.I. Bill
implementation.
Mr. Van Orden. Yes.
Mr. Mueller. It was taken. It was identified as the
undersecretary of benefits at the time.
Mr. Van Orden. Who was that?
Mr. Mueller. That was Dr. Paul Lawrence.
Mr. Van Orden. Where did Paul go?
Mr. Mueller. Well, no. That was the previous Forever G.I.
Bill, Colmery implementation. For the Digital G.I. Bill, the
accountable official is Mr. Garcia.
Mr. Van Orden. Aha. All roads lead to Garcia.
Mr. Mueller. As I stated in my oral testimony, those
recommendations were acted on----
Mr. Van Orden. Okay.
Mr. Mueller. and carried through into the current
modernization program.
Mr. Van Orden. Very well.
Mr. Garcia, I believe that we have come to common accord
and I have presented my commander's intent. I understand that
you get what that means. Again, I respect your service
tremendously. I appreciate the fact that you have decided to
continue serving our Nation. I just want you to step up this
game because all the answers are there. Okay? Finger on
calendar, please. I would appreciate that greatly.
With that, I yield back and I recognize my ranking member,
Mr. Levin, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Levin. I thank the chairman again and promise this is
my last question for you. Although it might be one that we will
have to revisit in future hearings or future meetings.
In January 2022, the House passed with a broad bipartisan
vote the G.I. Bill parity legislation for Guard and Reserve. As
we are contemplating your timeline and your plan, which I know
you are going to provide to us after this back and forth, are
you contemplating the possibility that we may be adding Guard
and Reserve eligibility? If so, are you incorporating that into
your thinking at all about the flexibility of more people that
are all of a sudden going to be eligible for these benefits?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, we will take a look at anybody who is
eligible that comes eligible, but I have to take that back and
get that information to you.
Mr. Levin. In the last Congress we passed it in the House
pretty overwhelmingly, and then the clock ran out with our
friends in the Senate. We are just going to try again. It was
not for a lack of interest or a lack of bipartisan agreement.
The devil is always in the details on these things, but I think
there is a reasonable possibility that in this Congress, next
Congress, who knows. That is going to happen and we are going
to see Guard and Reserve that are eligible. I think we learned
a lot in the process and we are going to come back and
hopefully get that across the finish line. I just want to make
sure you guys are prepared if there are all of a sudden a lot
more people who are eligible, that your system can handle it.
Is that fair?
Mr. Garcia. Yes, sir. We will be prepared.
Mr. Levin. All right. Again, I appreciate all that you are
doing, and we look forward to seeing those timelines from you.
I yield back.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, ranking member.
I now recognize Chairman Rosendale from the great state of
Montana.
Mr. Rosendale. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Garcia and Mr. Michl, what does delaying the next
release of the summer of 2024 do to the future releases seven,
eight, nine, for both time and cost? If you could give a quick
summary, what we could expect. Mr. Michl first and then Mr.
Garcia, your estimate. Time and cost with the delay of seven,
eight, and nine.
Mr. Michl. Sir, so moving release six, there is a degree of
critical path, so we need to analyze what can happen for future
releases, seven, eight, and nine, but they will likely also
need to move from current schedule.
Mr. Rosendale. That was stating the obvious, okay. I know
that. What kind of time are we talking about though?
Mr. Michl. Without additional inputs from the VA on what
the scope is and how we want to address the dependencies, it is
hard for me to speculate in that, sir.
Mr. Rosendale. You could not even estimate the time or cost
on that? We are right in our schedule to have this project--the
rollouts are supposed to be completed by the end of 24. Am I
correct there? Okay. If we are not going to have version six
rolled out until next summer, then clearly seven, eight, and
nine are not going to be able to be rolled out until 25 or
later, 26. Is that a safe assumption?
Mr. Michl. As I said, sir----
Mr. Rosendale. Are you telling me that there is any
realistic possibility that they would be able to be rolled out
after the summer of 24? Seven, eight, and nine?
Mr. Michl. Sir, we are looking at options to try to pull
back pieces where it makes sense, but also recognize that a
number of those are going to be dependent upon completing
release six and getting final inputs from the VA.
Mr. Rosendale. Understood. If the VA gave you everything
that you requested, are you telling me that there is any
potential that you would be able to roll those out by the end
of next year?
Mr. Michl. Not in their entirety.
Mr. Rosendale. Okay.
Mr. Garcia, tell me, version six is not going to roll out
until next summer. What do you think time and cost wise this is
going to end up taking to complete this project?
Mr. Garcia. Sir, I agree with Mr. Michl. The schedule will
be dependent on certain actions occurring first. I think the
first commitment is at release six for the summer, seven,
eight, nine will follow that. I cannot give you that time
schedule right now. As far as the cost, MITRE will produce the
life cycle cost estimate that will address that additional cost
and provide that to you accordingly.
Mr. Rosendale. Both of you,--let us say we go beyond the
time, because I think that we are stating the obvious again.
You are not going to be able to get this work completed by the
end of 24, unless something miraculous happens. The window of
cost is somewhere between 1.3-and $1.9 billion. Can I at least
get a commitment that you will not be coming back to this room
and saying we ran out of time and we ran out of money?
Mr. Garcia. The Undersecretary is committed to not coming
back for additional funding.
Mr. Rosendale. Okay. That does not make me sleep well, but
I guess that is what we have right now.
Mr. Michl, is it true that the project will not be
completed before your contract is slated to expire?
Mr. Michl. Our contract has multiple option years out to, I
believe 2029 or 2030. I am not sure that that is a true
statement, sir.
Mr. Rosendale. Is it broken out to the actual
implementation and the operation and maintenance? Are there
provisions in there? The 2029 is probably the operation and
maintenance cost, I would assume.
Mr. Michl. It is, sir.
Mr. Rosendale. Okay. Do we have provisions in there that
are going to end before you have the rollout completed? Because
the rollout is not going to be completed by the end of next
year. We are kidding ourselves. Does your contract call for
that in version seven, eight, and nine--is that portion of the
contract going to expire at the end of next year?
Mr. Michl. I would have to take this--and get you more
detail. I do not believe that there are details at that level
within the contract and I think modifications----
Mr. Rosendale. Okay. We are going to need a copy of that so
that we can see exactly how this is going to be able to
proceed. Okay.
I am down to about 36 seconds here.
Mr. Garcia, the next DGIB release is on track for a 1 year
delay. The project would not produce any new capability for an
entire year. Do you think that is acceptable?
Mr. Garcia. We will continue with other thing besides the
major releases. Automation efforts that we have been talking
about, other minor releases that occur, and the planning that
will be in place along with testing to make sure that we will
continue with those major releases in the future. It is not
that we are stopping. We will continue to make progress.
Mr. Rosendale. Okay.
I yield back Mr. Chair. Thank you.
Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would just like to make a couple closing remarks here.
I want to thank you all for coming. I appreciate it
greatly. Mr. Garcia. Not a great afternoon for you. I
appreciate that. I want you guys to come back here and I want
to have a great day together. That is what I want. The sole
intent of this subcommittee, the reason we exist in Congress,
is to make sure that our veterans receive the benefits that
they earned. They are not going to do that unless you step up
your game. It is not going to happen. I expect you to be more
proactive with us. I am telling you If we do not get the
answers that we want in a timely manner, I will subpoena you. I
will bring you here, and I will call CNN, and we will shine
bright lights right in your eyes, and it will be a very bad
day. I do not want to do that, but I will. It is not about me
or you or Mr. Levin or Rosendale or anybody else here, it is
about the person that does their time in the military, risk
their lives, they leave their family, and they want to better
themselves and become a productive member of society just as
they were a productive member of the military, and they do that
through education because education is the only way that you
can free the mind. You know that.
We are going to get this done and we are going to get it
done with you or we are going to get rid of you and we are
going to find somebody else to do it because it has to happen.
It is not an option. All right.
With that, I yield back.
I would like my ranking member--recognize him if you have
any closing comments.
Mr. Levin. I cannot follow that.
Mr. Van Orden. Chairman Rosendale, do you have any closing
comments?
Mr. Rosendale. Just look, thank you all for coming in. This
is one system that started off really well and we just want to
make sure it finishes well. That is all. We just want to make
sure it finishes well. Let us not drop the ball at this point.
Let us keep this thing going.
Mr. Van Orden. Very well.
I ask unanimous consent that all members may have 5
legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include
extraneous material.
Without objection, so ordered.
This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:36 p.m., the subcommittees were
adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
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Prepared Statement of Witnesses
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Prepared Statement of Joseph Garcia
Chairmen Van Orden and Rosendale, Ranking Members Levin and
Cherfilus-McCormick, and other Members of the Subcommittees, thank you
for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA or the Department) Digital GI Bill
(DGIB) program and the continued information technology system
improvements and upgrades. Accompanying me today is Mr. Robert Orifici
from the Office of Information and Technology (OIT).
To ensure VA serves all Veterans and their families seeking to use
their GI Bill benefits and equip them with the tools and resources
necessary to reach their academic and career goals, VA is modernizing
the GI Bill's Information Technology (IT) platform to deliver benefits
faster and enhance customer service. The goal of this effort is to
develop a modern digital platform, leveraging cloud-based automation,
digital service transformation, human-centered design, world-class
communications, analytics, and other important IT services. The
improvements will provide world-class customer and benefit services to
Veterans and VA's partners, enabling more timely and accurate delivery
of education benefits, providing near real-time eligibility and benefit
information, and allowing for first contact resolution.
Digital GI Bill Overview
Each year, approximately 200,000 Service members transition from
the military to civilian life. Over 875,000 Veterans, Service members,
and family members used VA education benefits last year alone,
receiving nearly $10 billion in education and training-related
benefits. The GI Bill provides an opportunity to skill up for the
civilian workforce by expanding opportunities for Service members,
Veterans, and eligible family members to pursue their academic goals,
enhancing the nation's economic strength with innovative programs that
support employment in high-demand fields and enriching lives by giving
beneficiaries the tools they need to further their education to lead to
fulfilling careers.
On March 11, 2021, VA awarded a contract to Accenture Federal
Services, which has partnered with VA Education Service (EDU) and VA
OIT to develop the DGIB. DGIB is a modernized business platform that
will feature world-class customer and financial services to enable
timely and accurate delivery of payments, real-time eligibility and
benefit information. This new platform will provide an end-to-end
systems management perspective to ensure proper compliance and
oversight of GI Bill programs and will allow the use of data and
business intelligence tools to monitor and measure school and student
outcomes. Using this platform, GI Bill students will have the ability
to engage with VA and their earned benefits through electronic
outreach, intake and communication tools for on-the-spot service.
Claims and Automation
Process automation is key for improving a veteran's GI Bill
experience. VA is striving to meet the goal of automating 50 percent of
original claims and 80 percent of supplemental claims. In just six
months after the contract was awarded, VA successfully deployed the
processing of Post-9/11 GI Bill claims to the DGIB Managed Service,
marking the first major milestone in the modernization journey. The
Managed Service allows for agile decision-making in a single, managed
platform that grows with VA's needs and responds to changes in
technology through continuous end-to-end updates.
Since the beginning of the program in March 2021 VA has identified
and resolved more than 20 automation improvement opportunities for
original and supplemental claims. Through multiple releases, VA has
made significant improvements in claims processing. In May 2023, the
full automation rate for supplemental claims was at 61.7 percent, 12.7
percent percentage points higher than the 49.0 percent automation rate
in May 2022 and 26.7 percent higher than the program baseline
automation rate of 35 percent in May 2021. In February 2023, VA
automated a record 68 percent of supplemental claims, automating the
processing of 188,000 claims.
VA's automation efforts to this point have created more streamlined
processes, updated tracking systems, eliminated redundancies, and
reduced overall manual intervention required from Veterans Claims
Examiners (VCEs).
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For the first time since the inception of the program, almost 80
years ago, many GI Bill applicants can receive a same-day education
benefits eligibility decision, thanks to a simplified Post-9/11 GI Bill
application experience enabled by DGIB. It provides Veterans the
ability to download and view digital copies of their Certificate of
Eligibility and decision letters, so Veterans no longer need to wait up
to five days for a paper copy to arrive in the mail. Through the
integration with VA/Department of Defense Identity Repository (VADIR),
Veterans may now experience pre-filled service history when entering an
online application for original claims, and no longer need to enter
that information by hand. VA continues its efforts to improve
automation, identifying and actively working on the following seven
automation improvement opportunities as of June 2023:
1. Benefits Delivery Network (BDN) CH33 Supplemental End
Product (EP) Creation
2. Enrollment Manager (EM) non-standard remarks
3. EM Mandate (7/1/23)
4. Automate My Education Benefits (MEB) Transfer of Entitlement
(TOE) Claims
5. Automate Non-College Degree (NCD) Claims
6. CH33 Award Letter Modernization
7. Release 6 Enterprise Management of Payments, workload, and
Reporting (eMPWR) switch
Recent Accomplishments
In the most recent DGIB major release in March 2023, VA deployed EM
to help School Certifying Officials (SCOs) at educational institutions
process enrollments more efficiently. This will help SCOs submit
enrollments faster, allowing them more time to assist GI Bill students
in reaching their educational goals. In only 3 months since EM
launched, VA surpassed one million enrollment certifications received.
Over 14,000 SCOs from over 10,000 institutions are using EM to deliver
earned benefits to Veterans and their families faster than ever before.
In the legacy system, VA Online Certification of Enrollment System (VA-
ONCE), claims took approximately one business day for the Long-Term
Solution system to process during business hours. In EM, claims are
created from school inputs within 5 minutes, during business hours,
which is 96 times faster than before. Finally, rapid releases of
additional functionality continue monthly demonstrating agility,
including 28 new requirements and 61 new user stories developed in
releases 5.2.0.1-5.2.2. between March and June 2023.
In future releases, Veterans, their families, SCOs, and other
partners can expect to see more user experience enhancements. For
example, GI Bill beneficiaries will benefit from a streamlined
application process, improved processing times and faster eligibility
decisions and entitlement adjudications, allowing them to focus on
their education and career goals. Through VA's modernization efforts
and the removal of redundant processes, VA is increasing efficiency
while allowing its employees and SCOs to focus on the mission of
supporting Veterans and their families.
Challenges
Implementing a Managed Service and improving automation involves
integrating numerous complex IT systems and decommissioning decades old
systems. For example, in navigating the complexity of decommissioning
BDN, the DGIB team continues to prioritize the development of system
requirements that can be readily implemented. By applying an all-hands-
on-deck approach, VA has been successful in creating a realistic plan
to transition legacy systems into the Managed Service. However, VA
acknowledges several challenges during this transition, such as a March
2023 issue that affected Monthly Housing Allowance payments.
As with any major issue, VA immediately established an incident
response team comprised of OIT experts, analysts, and engineers, to
identify and resolve the problem in several days and ensure payments
were completed. Through review of logs, processes, and code, the root
cause was identified as a configuration applied to the payment queuing
service as part of Release 5 on March 4, 2023. The configuration
triggered an unexpected pause in the payment queuing service. However,
thanks to valiant efforts of many employees at both VA and the
Department of Treasury, payments were still able to be released that
day, although later in the day than originally planned. As part of our
post-incident analysis, VA conducted a thorough review of the
infrastructure and processes to identify potential vulnerabilities and
ensure appropriate safeguards are in place. Specifically, multiple
actions were taken to mitigate this in the future, including auditing
of configuration for service condition execution establishing
additional business operations checks, and expanding operations testing
prior to Go-Live. These actions were driven by a commitment to protect
our organization's operations and to preserve trust with those we
serve. Working with Accenture Federal Services, our contracting team,
and OIT, VA is confident that appropriate safeguards are in place to
prevent similar incidents in the future. Additionally, these specific
issues were added to how VA examines all managed services across all
benefits portfolios to ensure similar safeguards are in place across
the enterprise.
Other challenges include limitations on the availability and number
of testing environments that have affected the overall timeline; and
the urgency of BDN shutdown has driven much of the timeline and
implementation capabilities delaying other automation and modernization
goals of the program. The mainframe manufacturer and support company
for BDN announced that there will be no continued support moving
forward due to lack of resources and equipment. Also contributing to
the urgency of BDN shutdown is the fact that most of the remaining
education benefit payment systems began development and were
implemented in the 1970's using outdated programming tools and
techniques that are no longer viable. The human resource pool is aging
out and finding new developers is very difficult. As a result, BDN
costs VA in excess of $20M+ per year which is compounded by an
increasing scarcity of replacement parts and human resources. The
amalgamation of these challenges has subsequently delayed the
overarching ability to apply technical solutions to increase automation
throughput, which impacts the requirement for maintaining current level
of full-time employees to manually process Education claims.
Additionally, the current contractual adjustment allows for the
inclusion of automation improvements not found in the initial contract.
VA is also navigating through external dependencies and complex
integrations with DoD's information, namely VADIR. VA is taking an
agile approach to be flexible in addressing service changes in VADIR
that impact critical systems integration and data ingestion. Due to
service changes in the way data is delivered within VADIR, a higher
rate of off-ramping resulted, which occurs when a claim is removed from
the automated process and reverts to manual processing. Consequently,
automation rates trended toward 49 percent, which was a drop from the
increased rates that had been achieved by the Managed Service.
Automation of Post-9/11 GI Bill claims is fluctuating due to these
ongoing VADIR service changes, but rates are expected to return to
higher levels over the next several months. VA is already seeing this
happen as automation rates have returned to the mid-50s percentile
range previously mentioned. Additionally, VA is developing a permanent
solution to the excess off-ramping by incorporating additional service
data from VADIR.
These back-end system improvements are improving claims processing,
reducing redundancies, and enhancing the overall GI Bill experience for
students as well as VA's partners. In line with its overall program
objectives, VA is continuing its commitment to measuring and improving
automation of Post-9/11 GI Bill claims and will continue to take an
agile approach to address and navigate complex external dependencies.
DGIB Releases
Since March 2021, VA has deployed six major releases and several
smaller releases to modernize GI Bill services and deliver benefits
faster, provide better customer service and strengthen its compliance
and oversight activities.
Release 1: Successful Legislation Implementation
On July 31, 2021, VA successfully rolled out its first DGIB
release, which implemented requirements associated with the Johnny
Isakson and David P. Roe, M.D. Veterans Health Care and Benefits
Improvement Act of 2020, and added functionality to increase
automation. Most notably, the release incorporated legislative updates
which included providing a simple and secure method for non-college
degree (NCD) students to verify monthly enrollment via text, a desired
method based on user feedback. VA's updates incorporated changes for
five provisions of the law: Section 1001: Rogers STEM Scholarship
improvements; Section 1005: Requirements for In-State Tuition; Section
1010: Monthly Enrollment Verification; Section 1019: Overpayments to
Eligible Persons or Veterans; and Section 1020: Improvements to
Limitation on Certain Advertising, Sales and enrollment practices.
Implementation of the Johnny Isakson and David P. Roe, M.D. Veterans
Health Care and Benefits Improvement Act of 2020 required multiple,
complex IT updates during an unprecedented pandemic and demonstrated
VA's ability to modernize while systematically implementing critical
pieces of legislation impacting GI Bill beneficiaries.
Release 2: Launching the DGIB Managed Service
On September 29, 2021, just 6 months into the DGIB contract, VA
activated the DGIB Managed Service, providing for improved processing
of Post-9/11 GI Bill supplemental claims and marking a major step in
the modernization journey. This involved migrating data from VA's
legacy environment so that VCEs could process Post-9/11 GI Bill
benefits in the DGIB Managed Service platform. The Managed Service
enables VA to be better prepared to initiate end-to-end updates,
minimize downtime, accommodate agile decision-making, more quickly
respond to legislative changes and reduce manual and redundant
processes. With Release 2, VA took additional major steps in
transforming GI Bill claims processing. As VA continues to bring legacy
systems into its Managed Service, efficiency and user experience will
continue to improve for VA employees and Veterans alike.
Release 3: Introducing Enrollment Verification via Email
On January 15, 2022, VA expanded the rollout of Section 1010 of the
Johnny Isakson and David P. Roe, M.D. Veterans Health Care and Benefits
Improvement Act of 2020 to students attending Institutions of Higher
Learning, added an email verification option, and deployed additional
capabilities designed to make enrollment-related processes faster and
simpler than ever before. With this release, over 300,000 GI Bill
students are now able to verify their enrollment status each month via
email or text message to receive their monthly housing allowance and/or
kicker payments. This release expanded upon VA's successful rollout of
text-message verification to the NCD facility population (approximately
an additional 30,000 GI Bill students) in August 2021. Additionally,
release 3 enhanced system capabilities to refine and improve automation
of supplemental claims processing for Post-9/11 GI Bill students.
Release 4: Veteran Employment Through Technology Education Courses (VET
TEC) Managed Service Go-Live
On April 16, 2022, VA deployed Release 4 of the DGIB, providing
additional Post-9/11 GI Bill supplemental claims processing
improvements by removing certain off-ramps and decreasing manual
processing actions for VCEs to enable faster claims processing. This
release also migrated the processing of VET TEC claims to the Managed
Service, which includes entry of VET TEC applications, calculation of
VET TEC awards for enrollments and terminations with and without
amendments and manual upload of letters for VET TEC claimants. This
will result in improved processing of VET TEC claims.
Release 5: Improved Application Experience for First-Time Applicants
On August 20, 2022, VA made applying for the Post-9/11 GI Bill on
VA.gov easier than ever for eligible Veterans and Service members who
have verified their identity through ID.me or Login.gov and are
applying for the first time. By streamlining and automating the Post-9/
11 GI Bill application experience, VA is now able to pre-fill service
history for some Veterans and Service Members and provide them with
eligibility decisions within seconds, and give them quick access to
digital copies of eligibility letters and a better user experience with
intuitive designs.
Release 6: Enrollment Manager Launch
On March 4, 2023, VA successfully launched EM, which replaced VA-
ONCE. This new system modernizes the process for SCOs to certify and
submit student enrollments, streamlines user experience, and improves
claims processing. Since its launch, over 10,000 education providers
have used EM to process more than 1 million enrollments.
Future State
The future State of the DGIB is driven by the people who support
and receive benefits from the GI Bill program, leveraging human-
centered design (HCD). The end-users - including Veterans and their
families - are at the center of the experience. The future state will
seek to deliver the experience end users desire, by identifying both
pain points and the experiences they enjoy when interacting with other
websites and commercial entities. DGIB leverages the HCD process to
inform updates to the program roadmap. To support this, HCD User
Feedback Sessions are conducted with GI Bill students, SCOs, State
Approving Agencies (SAAs) and internal VA staff to understand user
experience, pain points and areas for improvement and a research
readout was created to summarize findings. This feedback informs the
design stage where ideas are designed to address pain points and
opportunities during concepting and sketching sessions. Before moving
on to development, testing and validation of prototypes with different
internal and external users is completed to measure success and
feasibility of designs. The benefit of DGIB's HCD approach continuously
puts the end-user at the center of the modernization and experience
that we are creating. In 2024, VA plans to deploy further business
capabilities including:
CH 33 Automation Improvement
Approval Manager
Web Enabled Approval Management System (WEAMS)
Consolidation
Workload Manager
Image Management System (TIMS)/eFolder Migration
Chapter 33 eMPWR-VA Interface
Payment Service
VA is developing a new capability, Approval Manager, to replace
WEAMS, as we continue to move functionality into the DGIB Managed
Service. Approval Manager will be the new system for Education Liaison
Representatives, SAAs, and VA staff to approve new programs for
education benefits. Approval Manager will help improve the end user
interface, save Education Service staff time generating Compliance
Survey Worksheets, and streamline the profile for each school,
including a consolidated list of all SCO and Point of Contact types, as
well as a single page that displays all programs by approval status.
Additionally, Approval Manager's connection with Enrollment Manager
will help more quickly reflect any changes to a school or program in
Enrollment Manager.
Another new capability, Workload Manager, will replace TIMS as the
new method for VCEs to view and manage workload of GI Bill claims that
need processing. This system will connect with My Education Benefits
(the VA.gov site where GI Bill students go to apply or receive updates
on their education benefits) and Benefits Manager (a future DGIB
microsystem in which VCEs will create and update claims) to transform
how they are assigned tasks. Workload Manager will bridge the gap from
a Veteran's application to the claims processing end of Benefits
Manager. A VCE will review new claims in Workload Manager, create work
credits, and route it to Benefits Manager for processing.
The DGIB team is continuing to make enhancements which contribute
to direct, online, one-stop access to education benefit resources.
These changes will continue the evolution of a Managed Service that
increases efficiency and reduces manual processes, allowing VA to focus
more on serving Veterans and their families.
Reassessment
VA is committed to ensuring the DGIB program and continued system
improvement and upgrades provide optimal support of student Veterans
and the SCOs that support them. Additionally, VA will continue to be an
effective steward of all taxpayer provided resources. VA has worked
with Accenture Federal Services on a modification to the current
contract to meet emerging requirements, clarify testing capabilities
and add additional integrations to other VA systems. VA has reviewed a
proposal from the vendor to ensure that the needs of VA are met and the
impacts to cost and schedule are well understood. VA is working toward
a course of action to address cost, risk and business-related concerns
and will continue to work closely with AFS to ensure VA's needs are
addressed. Although we are proceeding with a sense of urgency,
sufficient time will be allotted to validate that the key objectives
will be met.
Communications with Partners
VA continues to advance its ability to effectively speak directly
with students, schools, and other partners. To increase awareness of
how DGIB releases positively impact VA GI Bill students' and partners'
experiences, it is making targeted outreach efforts to effectively
communicate GI Bill modernization updates to partners. With an
omnichannel outreach strategy, VA is amplifying awareness and
increasing adoption of complex IT and policy changes. In the months
leading up to the deployment of Enrollment Manager, VA reached out to
over 91,000 SCOs and administrators through 68 emails. VA used both the
SCO in the Know and SAA newsletters, to amplify tips and IT updates for
using EM effectively. VA also closely monitored questions that the
Education Call Center (ECC) receives to address students' and SCO's
most pressing questions in VA communication efforts and help alleviate
ECC call volume.
In Winter 2022, VA EDU hosted three SCO EM Soft Launch Events at GI
Bill schools to validate Enrollment Manager during the transition
period. The schools included American University, George Mason
University, and GT Aviation. VA was able to identify required system
updates in real-time, triaging and addressing them with the DGIB
development team. All updates were taken back, and several were
addressed immediately while others were addressed for implementation in
future releases. VA also conducted six virtual training sessions
covering the EM experience, providing SCOs an opportunity to ask
questions and get a final look at Enrollment Manager before it went
live.
VA Education Service also recognized that the successful rollout of
EM required not only the system to be up and running, but pre-and-post
go-live support for end users to drive system adoption. The ECC alone
was not enough to support SCOs questions; SCOs needed system experts
who could walk through their questions with them. In March 2023 in
tandem with Enrollment Manager go-live, VA stood up a Customer
Experience Group (CEG) to triage questions and issues in real time.
Externally, the CEG connected with the SCO hotline and provided a means
to escalate certain SCO questions to a one-on-one over-the-shoulder
setting using Adobe Captivate; internally, VA had daily meetings with
stakeholders to work together to identify, discuss, triage and work
through issues. During its 2-month run, the CEG responded to over 9,700
calls from SCOs, initiated more than 3,000 Adobe Connect sessions to
provide more detailed assistance, and created over 100 Service Now
tickets to track potential IT updates required in Enrollment Manager.
The rollout of the new system, including first call resolution of
SCO questions and issues, garnered accolades from SCOs and Veterans
Service Organizations. One SCO who called the CEG and worked together
to submit an enrolment said, ``Is that it? Wow, that's amazing, this is
so simple. Are you sure there isn't more buttons to press? Enrollment
Manager is one and done!'' In the month leading up to the Enrollment
Manager deployment, VA's GI Bill Enrollment Manager videos reached over
11,000 views on VBA's YouTube channel and 2,500 individuals on the
Post-9/11 GI Bill Facebook page. In addition, over 220 SCOs posted
comments and questions regarding the Digital GI Bill's newest
interface, Enrollment Manager. Through VA's outreach efforts and
communication platforms, it is committed to informing its partners and
listening to Veterans' needs.
In tandem with its modernization efforts, VA EDU delivers
communications and messaging to students and schools via multiple
channels. VA EDU produces newsletters for students, schools, and SAAs
as an opportunity to streamline delivery of GI Bill updates but also to
provide additional services and resources from VA. Past newsletters
have included updates to the Veterans Crisis Line, legislative updates
and VA hiring opportunities. Communication campaigns are done via
email, video, blogs, training updates and social media to ensure
students and schools are receiving information in multiple ways, but
also through different channels to increase its effectiveness and
awareness.
Conclusion
Chairmen, VA has made tremendous strides in the administration of
VA education benefits in recent years through modernization efforts.
Many lessons have been learned along the way, and VA continues to seek
feedback from partners and find ways to improve education benefits
delivery through modernization. VA looks forward to continued
opportunities to work with Congress to address Veterans' concerns and
provide a better GI Bill experience. VA appreciates the support of
these Committees as VA continues its effort to modernize VA educational
assistance programs. This concludes my testimony. My colleagues and I
look forward to responding to any questions you or other Members of the
Subcommittees may have.
______
Prepared Statement of Troy Mueller
Chairman Van Orden and Rosendale, Ranking Members Cherfilus-
McCormick and Levin, and other Members of the Subcommittees, thank you
for the opportunity to testify before you today on matters relating to
the Department of Veteran's Affairs (VA) Digital GI Bill program.
Successful modernization of legacy IT is critical to improving the
veteran experience. MITRE very much appreciates the opportunity to
share our insight from our work on this critical program.
MITRE is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation. We are chartered
to operate in the public interest, which includes operating federally
funded research and development centers, or FFRDCs, on behalf of
federal agency sponsors. We currently operate six FFRDCs. The Center
for Enterprise Modernization was established in 1998 by the Department
of Treasury and we have been proud to support many modernization
efforts under that FFRDC, which is now jointly sponsored by the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Department of Commerce and the
Social Security Administration (SSA). Currently, I am a Department Head
in MITRE's Center for Government Effectiveness and Modernization,
responsible for directing our support to modernization of benefits and
service delivery across all Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA)
lines of business. The other primary sponsors for which MITRE operates
FFRDCs include the Department of Defense; the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services at the Department of Health and Human Services; the
National Institute of Standards and Technology which operates the
National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence; the Federal Aviation
Administration; and the Department of Homeland Security.
As an Air Force veteran, I know firsthand that serving in the
military opens the door to many benefits including the life-changing
opportunity to access higher education. Education benefits span those
entering the service through officer training programs, tuition
assistance and fully funded degree programs while on active duty, and
the GI Bill and other education programs for veterans and their
families. I myself have benefited from each of these programs. I
received an Air Force ROTC scholarship for my undergraduate degree. I
completed my master's degree under tuition assistance, and I earned a
doctorate via the Post-9/11 GI Bill. If not for these benefits, I would
not be sitting here before you today. Supporting the VA's mission is
not merely a job or an assignment, it's personal. It's my way of giving
back.
A Trusted Partner
MITRE has been a partner with Education Service since 2008. We were
brought on board to support the implementation of The Post-9/11
Veterans' Educational Assistance Act of 2008 (Post-9/11 GI Bill). MITRE
worked alongside Education Service, its VBA partners, and the Office of
Information Technology (OIT) to help drive development of a new system
to process Post-9/11 GI Bill claims.
Education Service reached out to MITRE again in 2019 to prepare for
an extensive modernization of their claims processing systems. MITRE
worked with Education Service to draw up the Modernization Value
Proposition to include the path forward for modernizing claims
processing and customer service, providing direct, online, one-stop
access to GI Bill benefits and information. Speed and simplicity are
essential for veterans trying to access their benefits while facing
college application deadlines. This modernization vision is a
transition to a holistic service that improves user experiences across
the entire internal and external environment.
MITRE's role has focused on providing strategic advice, guidance,
and assistance in the areas of systems engineering, program
integration, and organizational change. Representative activities
include formulating a concept of operations, eliciting operational
requirements, co-creating acquisition artifacts, developing the life
cycle cost estimate, establishing and refining program governance and
management processes, assessing organizational impacts of
modernization, and providing recommendations to improve stakeholder
communications and outreach. Most recently, MITRE worked closely with
Education Service to establish a new Program Management Office to
ensure effective oversight and governance for the program by developing
standard operating procedures, implementing new change control
processes, developing a change management roadmap and communications
plan, crafting customer experience group implementation plans, and
conducting PMO capability gap and staffing analyses.
A Record of Accomplishment
Over the past three-plus years, the Digital GI Bill program has had
many accomplishments delivering six major releases, including providing
the ability for same-day education benefits eligibility decisions,
allowing access to digital copies of Certificate of Eligibility (COE)
and decision letters, and deployment of Enrollment Manager, a
capability that compressed the time of claim creation from school
inputs to less than 5 minutes.
The integrated DGIB team is extremely sensitive to the impact of
time on veterans and beneficiaries. Delays in processing could drive a
semester or entire academic year-long delay for some students as some
degree completion or accelerated graduate programs only start once a
year. These delays are not just start dates for school, they are delays
in pursuing dreams and achieving life goals.
In addition to program delivery accomplishments, the VA has
demonstrated gains in maturity regarding program governance, execution,
and decision-making. In September 2018, MITRE was tasked to conduct an
independent technical assessment of the implementation of Sections 107
and 501 of the Colmery Act, or Forever GI Bill, which resulted in 20
recommendations. The acceptance and implementation of these
recommendations contributed not only to the December 1, 2019, on-time
delivery of capability, but these lessons of cross-VA partnership,
accountability, and bias for action have influenced the structure and
execution of the DGIB program and other VBA modernization programs.
Programs of this size and complexity intended to modernize an
environment of multiple legacy systems with numerous dependencies in an
enterprise that includes parallel modernization efforts are never
without risks. VBA to its credit is currently conducting a strategic
review of this program as part of an effort to identify and evaluate
opportunities to improve delivery of benefits and services. This review
is an example of using governance, processes, tools, and experienced
staff to illuminate challenges, craft options, and propose adjustments
and improvements that will increase the probability of future success.
The outcome of this review will position the VA to maintain a rhythm of
capability delivery while ensuring good stewardship of the taxpayers'
dollars.
Recommendations
Recognizing that there will always be challenges, complexity, and
risks, I have two recommendations to share with you.
The first recommendation is to encourage the VA to continue to
mature its contracting and program management capabilities and ensure
proper allocation and alignment of resources with demonstrated
knowledge, skills, and experience to appropriate programs and projects.
A contracting officer with extensive experience procuring commodities
is not the same as one who has worked on and led development and
execution of exquisite acquisition strategies for large, complex
transformational programs impacting entire enterprises. The same can be
said of program managers. Both are scarce resources that require
agencies to be deliberate about career development and assignments.
The second recommendation is for the House Committee on Veterans'
Affairs and Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs to continue the
direct monthly engagement of their staff with Education Service. This
meeting, which started during the Colmery Act implementation, has
become a critical part of the battle rhythm of the DGIB program, just
as important as program increment planning sessions, technical working
groups, and program governance meetings including the executive
steering committee. From our vantage point, these monthly engagements
promote transparency, provide the opportunity for dialog, and
contribute to the momentum of risk and issue identification,
mitigation, and decision-making on the program.
In closing, let me just note that of MITRE's roughly 10,000
personnel, over 1,600 are Veterans. There are few duties that our
employees consider more noble and consequential than honoring, through
our support for the VA, the service and sacrifice of our nation's men
and women in uniform. On behalf of the entire MITRE team, I greatly
appreciate the opportunity to come before you today, and I look forward
to your questions.
______
Prepared Statement of Kyle Michl
Chairman Van Orden, Chairman Rosendale, Ranking Member Levin,
Ranking Member Cherfilus-McCormick, and members of the Subcommittees on
Economic Opportunity and Technology Modernization, thank you for
inviting me to testify at today's hearing. I am Kyle Michl, the Senior
Delivery Lead for the Digital GI Bill (``DGIB'') Delivery Program and
the Chief Innovation Officer of Accenture Federal Services (``Accenture
Federal'' or the ``Company''). We are proud to testify here today with
our client and partner, the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs
(``VA''), and our colleagues from MITRE, on our joint efforts to
modernize and improve GI Bill claims processing for beneficiaries
including Veterans, service members, and their dependents.
Accenture Federal Services
Accenture Federal is a leading U.S. federal services company and
subsidiary of Accenture LLP. For more than four decades, we have helped
clients in defense, national security, public safety, civilian, and
military health organizations take on the demands of their mission,
mandate, or moment. We put our clients at the forefront of change,
harnessing it to solve the country's mission-critical challenges. Our
teams bring the most advanced R&D, latest technologies, and human-
centered design together with the power and commercial innovation of
Accenture's global network to help clients achieve desired outcomes and
build a digital core that fuels continuous innovation and creates value
for their customers, workforce, and partners. Mission success is at the
heart of everything we do, and we are privileged to advance our
clients' priorities, particularly as we serve our Veteran community
through our work with VA.
Accenture Federal has a longstanding partnership with VA
collaborating on programs that deliver meaningful outcomes for
Veterans, service members, and their families. For example, Accenture
Federal was selected to successfully implement the Harry W. Colmery
Act--delivering mission-critical VA Education Service claims processing
that Veterans rely on for timely, accurate disbursement of payments. We
support the VA Home Loan Program by providing development, security,
and operations of Loan Guaranty (``LGY'') systems, and platform
configuration and implementation alongside VA's Office of Information
and Technology's (``OIT's'') Service Management Office.
I have worked for Accenture for 26 years and had the privilege to
serve our government clients for nearly 20 years. I have been a member
of our federal leadership team since July 2020 when I became Accenture
Federal's Chief Innovation Officer. In that role, I focus on bringing
the best of emerging technologies to help our clients modernize and
transform their business. Over the years, I have delivered large scale
programs for both civilian and defense agencies and took on the Senior
Delivery Lead role for the VA DGIB program in May 2022.
DGIB Program History and Successes
Since March 2021, Accenture Federal has supported VA under the DGIB
Delivery Program to improve access for Veterans to the educational
benefits they have earned. Together, we are streamlining education
claims processing and transforming systems for VA's Veterans Benefits
Administration (``VBA'') through human-centered design, service
modernization, analytics, training, communications, and other services.
With DGIB, we are creating simple digital experiences to help Veterans
and their families complete their educational journeys more
efficiently. In addition to transforming the user experience, the DGIB
Program enables implementation of legislation in a more rapid and agile
manner, including the Veterans Health Care and Benefits Improvement Act
of 2020. Below are examples of how this program is serving Veterans:
Continuous Delivery of Meaningful Outcomes: VA and
Accenture Federal have delivered six major releases, as well as a
regular cadence of smaller, agile releases to our platform. With each
release, VA provides requirements for Accenture Federal to implement
within VA's complex ecosystem of policy, procedures, and integrated
systems. In addition to providing enhanced Veteran and stakeholder
services, these releases are aimed at driving automation and improving
time to receipt of benefits. Together, VA and Accenture Federal have
made significant strides in areas including user experience, service
enhancements, program insights, and processing efficiencies. Release
spotlights include:
Intuitive User Experience & Rapid Decisions for
Eligible First-Time Beneficiaries: We delivered new
functionality for beneficiaries applying for their Post-9/11 GI
Bill benefits for the first time. Through new, intuitive
designs and updated functionalities--such as a pre-filled
service history function--we have streamlined and simplified
the process to apply for Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits, making it
easier than ever to complete. By reducing eligibility
processing from 30 days down to a matter of minutes, as well as
providing the ability to retrieve digital copies of decision
letters, we are helping applicants start their educational
journey faster than ever before. For the first time in the GI
Bill's 79-year history, these enhancements automate original
claims.
Providing Schools Modernized Claim Capabilities:
After beneficiaries start their educational journey, School
Certifying Officials (``SCOs'') are the front door to
continuing and completing their educational goals. To better
serve SCOs' Veteran-focused mission, we introduced Enrollment
Manager--replacing a decades old legacy system--streamlining
the process to submit enrollments for students. More than
15,000 SCOs have accessed Enrollment Manager since launch. The
new system has reduced the number of steps to enter an
enrollment to as few as five (5) clicks, and, already, more
than 1.4M enrollments have been submitted. Most importantly,
SCOs now have more time to focus on what matters most--helping
Veterans, service members, and their families meet and exceed
their educational goals.
24/7 Chat Support for Schools: With the release of
the new GI Bill Chatbot, SCOs now have live 24/7 support and
quick access to answers and key information. Since the release,
there have been over 7,000 sessions with SCOs resulting in a
decreased number of calls to the VA Education Call Center (ECC)
and real-time triage of questions from schools. This new
functionality helps SCOs rapidly complete accurate claims to
support beneficiaries.
Powering Meaningful Employment for Veterans: We
migrated the processing of VET TEC claims--a pilot program
aimed at connecting Veterans to with leading technology
training programs and employment--to DGIB. The results are
improved processing of claims and monitoring of Veteran
training and attainment of meaningful employment.
Omni-Channel Communication Outreach to GI Bill
Beneficiaries: By adding new email and text message enrollment
verification options, we reduced the risk of students having
their payments withheld, all without overwhelming the VA
Education Call Center (``ECC''). This implements part of
Section 1010 within the Veterans Health Care and Benefits
Improvement Act of 2020, which requires students to verify
enrollment for housing allowance and/or kicker payments. This
is just one example of many agile legislative implementation
successes.
Demonstrated Claim Automation Improvement: By automating
the first original claim in VA Education Service history, DGIB
increased original automation rates from 0 percent to 32 percent in May
2023. For supplemental claims, the automation rate in May 2023 was 62
percent, 13 percentage points higher than the same month last year and
27 percentage points higher than when DGIB efforts began. Notably, DGIB
achieved a record high supplemental claim automation rate of 68 percent
in February 2023.
Modernized Legacy Systems: With streamlined VA processes
and our new technology platform, we have achieved a 99.99 percent
system availability rate for claims processing and we are helping VA
decommission antiquated legacy IT systems to improve the speed and
accuracy of its education claims processes. We have sunset a number of
legacy systems, including retiring two of the three largest legacy
systems. As part of our modernization efforts, we have exceeded DGIB's
three-year IT infrastructure reduction targets. The improvements
provide enhanced user experience, near real-time eligibility and
benefits information, and more timely and accurate delivery of
education services to hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries annually.
Analytic Insights Powering Service Improvements: A
recently deployed new DGIB analytics capability provides several
benefits, such as enabling certain reports to be completed in hours
rather than days. This new capability acts as a single source of data
for ad hoc requests, and providing a foundation for AI use cases that
may include claims optimization, operations, user experience,
automation, fraud detection, compliance, and oversight.
Award Winning Transformation Approaches: Working with VA,
we are reimagining the GI Bill experience in other ways by driving
transparency and outcomes and keeping stakeholders informed. To help
communicate awareness, impact, and outcomes, we have applied an omni-
channel, comprehensive, data-driven approach for key stakeholder groups
(e.g., beneficiaries, SCOs, employers, State Approving Agencies
(``SAAs''), Congress, Veterans Service Organizations (``VSOs''), and
media outlets). This includes over 500 email campaigns, 35 videos, in-
person outreach events, and hundreds of social media campaigns to
successfully reach nearly two million stakeholders. The results--
recognized by the 2022 International Marcom and PR Daily Awards--have
successfully increased the awareness of the GI Bill, further enabling
more Veterans, service members, and families to achieve their
educational goals, increasing their opportunities and lifetime
earnings.
Path Forward
A large complex program like DGIB has numerous dependencies,\1\
both within and external to the program. Recognizing this, VA and
Accenture Federal have established governance processes to identify
risks early and assess impacts. Accenture Federal worked jointly with
VA to outline and agree to an updated roadmap, key dependencies, and
target schedule. Subsequently, gaps were identified in the availability
and number of planned VA testing environments and the timelines for
external non-DGIB system development. Together, VA and Accenture
Federal have continued to make progress on DGIB milestones while
jointly working through options to address the gaps in these
dependencies.
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\1\ A dependency refers to any number of prerequisite requirements
for contract performance. Numerous contract dependencies exist with
respect to other VA programs.
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We are actively engaged with VA to replan future releases and
address challenges to the path forward. We have worked closely with VA
to outline potential options for a path forward while continuing to
fulfill program commitments. Given the significant progress made
jointly with VA on future release capabilities, we are optimistic our
partnership with VA will continue to provide world-class modernized
services to Veteran beneficiaries. This includes deploying developed
capabilities like Approval Manager, Workload Manager, and Benefits
Manager that will replace aging legacy systems with modern technologies
and digital experiences.
Conclusion
We remain steadfast in our commitment to deliver modernization,
improve user experience through human centered design, seamlessly
implement legislation, execute a clearly defined communications and
training strategy, and integrate legacy IT systems to make a dramatic
difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Veterans, service
members, and their families. Through the use of innovative
technologies, we are strengthening the foundation that provides agile,
rapid deployments, improved automation, and enhanced data insight using
machine learning. We are proud to help VA bring to life its truly bold
DGIB vision. This transformation puts Veterans at the heart of the
experience and positions VA as a leader in providing benefits. Our
focus will always be on delivering the best outcomes for our client,
for Veterans and for the American taxpayer.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
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