May 30, 2009 by admin.

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May 8, 2009 by admin.

By Bob Brewin 05/04/2009

An online benefits application Web site that the Veterans Affairs Department launched on May 1 continued to encounter problems on Monday after coming to a near halt on Friday.The department created the Veterans OnLine Application (Vonapp) site in response to the new GI bill, the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, which provides veterans with more generous educational benefits than the previous GI bill, originally passed in 1944. For example, this version hikes payments for tuition from $1,300 a month to a payment that is pegged at the highest tuition at a public university in a veteran’s state of residence, which for Massachusetts would be $10,232. The bill includes monthly living expenses of $1,100 to $1,200.The site either timed out or responded slowly on May 1, the first day post-9/11 veterans could file for the rich package of educational benefits.Vonapp continued to frustrate veterans trying to file benefit applications, with the site prominently displaying a message warning users they could experience problems uploading attachments to their online applications:”Attention VONAPP Users:Some users have reported problems with attaching documents. This is a temporary issue currently being addressed. If you are unable to attach documents, proceed to complete and submit your application without attachments. Please mail your supporting documents to the VA regional office listed on your confirmation page. Once full attachment capability is available, this page will be updated.”The notice was posted after VA experienced what it described as an “unprecedented” volume of users trying to access Vonapp. Late Friday, after veterans nationwide complained about an inability to access the site, VA posted a notice that read: “We are receiving an unprecedented number of users on the Vonapp Web site at this time. When accessing Vonapp, you may experience delayed response time, error messages and possible timeouts. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.”Veterans are asked to supply documents to receive benefits include their DD Form 214, Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty.In the morning of May 2, users could not access the site. A notice told veterans, “Our servers are currently unavailable. It may be possible they are down for maintenance. We ask that you please try back later. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and ask for your patience.”By that afternoon, Vonapp was available with a swift connection from a Nextgov remote office in Las Vegas, N.M., and appeared to be functioning smoothly until the notice about document attachments appeared about noon EDT on Monday.Robert McFarland, who served as VA’s chief information officer from January 2004 to April 2006, said the department should have anticipated that it would have been hit with a heavy load on its online benefits system and should have beefed it up to meet the anticipated demand.”We’re not talking about the entire population of the country [trying to access the site]. . . . It’s a finite number, and you plan for that for that finite number,” he said.Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, estimates 1 million veterans are eligible for the new GI bill benefits. Sullivan said the speedy connection he experienced to the site on Monday indicates VA worked overtime to resolve connection problems with the system. “Instead of taking four minutes to enter [on Friday], VA’s computers responded in a few seconds,” he said.McFarland said it should not be have been difficult for VA to have developed a system that could manage attachments, and added until it could handle attachments, the Veterans Benefits Administration should use a hybrid online/mail-in application process.Larry Scott, who runs the VA watchdog group VA Watchdog.org in Vancouver, Wash., said he believed “VBA is creating an electronic nightmare to go along with their paper nightmare.”Scott said it does not make sense to e-mail documents to VBA. “The average vet will scan into a graphic format such as .JPG or .PDF,” he said. “To make the document readable, VBA would have to run [optical character recognition] software on it, and depending on the quality of the scan from the veteran, this could lead to many errors that would then have to be manually corrected by someone at VBA.”VBA will find it difficult to collate documents mailed to regional offices along with online application forms, Scott added.McFarland said the difficulty matching paper documents with online applications depends on whether VA plans to process post-9/11 claims in a central location or regional offices.The problems VA continues to experience with Vonapp, Scott said, will add delays to a tight schedule to start processing post-9/11 GI bill benefit claims by Aug. 1.VA did not respond to a query from Nextgov by deadline on what caused the problems on Friday, or what it is doing to resolve the problems in attaching documents to an online application.

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May 4, 2009 by admin.

Veterans frustrated over inaccessible, slow online benefits system

By Bob Brewin 05/01/2009

Veterans nationwide, trying for the first time on Friday to log on to online forms to apply for a rich package of educational benefits, encountered a network that either failed or was extremely slow.

The Veterans Affairs Department launched the Veterans Online Application (Vonapp) site to begin taking applications from veterans interested in the benefits offered in the new GI Bill, whose formal title is the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act.

The GI bill provides veterans with more generous educational benefits than the previous GI bill, originally passed in 1944. For example, this version hikes payments for tuition from $1,300 a month to a payment that is pegged at the highest tuition at a public university in a veteran’s state of residence, which for Massachusetts would be $10,232. The bill includes monthly living expenses of $1,100 to $1,200.

But veterans became frustrated when they tried to log onto the site. Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said it took more than four minutes to reach Vonapp’s login screen using his computer in Austin, Texas, which has a high-speed cable modem.

“Veterans should not be viewing the hour glass of death” as they try to file for benefits, he said. “The VA needs to fix this now.”

Joe Mancinik, a Navy veteran who attends The George Washington University in Washington, said his attempts to access the site took more than a minute. Once on the site, however, the system timed out.

When Larry Scott, who runs the VA watch dog group Watchdog.org in Vancouver, Wash., tried to log on for the first time, he received a message from Vonapp that read: “Connection Interrupted. The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.”

Scott, who accesses the Internet over a 24-megabyte-per-second cable connection, said he was successful signing into the site on his second attempt, but “the connection was slow beyond belief.”

“It appears the VA did not adequately prepare their servers to handle what they knew to be a huge load,” he said. “They had to know this was coming.”

Others who were able to log on to the system also found the site slow. Dean Lee, assistant adjutant for the Veterans of Foreign Wars Department of California, said communications with the site dragged over his T-1 connection, which receives data at 1.5 megabytes per second.

Nextgov attempted to connect to Vonapp three times over a 100 megabyte-per-second Internet circuit from its offices in Washington and once received a time-out message, with the other two attempts taking minutes to complete.

At a Nextgov remote office in Las Vegas, N.M., only one connection out of 10 attempts worked, and that was shortly after midnight EDT, when registration for the new GI bill benefits first opened.

All attempts to reach the Vonapp login page after 11 a.m. EDT from New Mexico either resulted in a time out or an inability to get beyond the first two or three screens that lead into the login page.

Sullivan said 1 million veterans are eligible for post-911 educational benefits and VA should have anticipated a heavy load on the first filing day.

VA should have tested if the system could handle a heavy load, said Bob Charette, president the risk analysis firm Itabhi Corp. in Spotsylvania, Va. “This could just be a first-day problem, unless its continues over the weekend,” he said.

The department has until Aug. 1 to receive and process the claims, and VA made a smart decision to start the application process three months before it had to make payments, said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Washington.

He said he had no problems accessing Vonapp from his office, adding he was “not a techie, but I would imagine most systems would have difficulties handling potentially hundreds of thousands of accesses at the same time.”

VA did not respond to a query on the amount of traffic the site experienced on Friday and what it could have done to resolve connection problems.

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