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Dear School Certifying Official,
The Digital GI Bill (DGIB) runs a Monthly Housing Allowance (MHA) payment transmission to the Benefits Delivery Network (BDN) at the end of every month. Last month (March 2023), this process failed for approximately 282,000 total student Veterans and beneficiaries who were entitled to approximately $400 million in housing stipends as a part of their earned GI Bill benefits. Upon learning of this problem, we implemented extraordinary measures to minimize any disruption for these Veterans. As a result of these efforts, approximately 278,000 Veterans received their monthly housing payments for March the same day as scheduled (albeit in the afternoon vice the morning). For the remaining 4,000 Veterans who receive monthly paper checks, those were sent out by the Department of the Treasury and received the following week.
VA’s Root Cause Analysis (RCA) determined that as part of Release 5 of the DGIB, which introduced the Enrollment Manager, an incorrect configuration was applied to the payment queuing service that made it dependent upon BDN availability. When the payment queuing function determined BDN was down for scheduled maintenance, it paused the queuing service until the next day, resulting in the housing payments failing to process on schedule. In addition, lack of sufficient monitoring and alert systems delayed this problem from being elevated and addressed immediately.
VBA has a high level of confidence that we will be able to pay the MHA on time and without issues in April based on the RCA and our monitoring and alerting processes and systems. DGIB has technical monitoring and alerting implemented to include monitoring of services, log aggregation, dashboarding, availability of partner systems, downtime, and critical health alerting. This was recently augmented with new business operations monitoring to help catch situations like the MHA payment issue in the future. We are also working to identify additional Operations Report thresholds for alerting and automated checks that will be implemented incrementally while manual checks continue daily.
In addition, we are producing a punch list of system dependencies for all future systems releases, to ensure there are no unintended impacts that may affect payment. We are also finalizing a Standard Operating Procedure to ensure appropriate and timely escalation and triage of these types of issues moving forward. Finally, the team is conducting an environmental assessment of all VBA systems to assess for risk of the magnitude we experienced with the MHA payment issue.
I hope this gives you insight into what occurred, and the actions VA has taken to ensure GI Bill students continue to receive their MHA payments in a timely manner.
Thank you for your continued support of our GI Bill students.
Sincerely,
Joseph Garcia
Executive Director
Education Service
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