The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a new report on Aug. 28 that reveals that poor planning by the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) in an IT modernization project led to significant delays and more than doubled the original contract cost.
The Forever GI Bill, which Congress passed in 2017, expanded education benefits and required the VBA to transform its IT system to improve the speed and accuracy of its education claims processes.
In March 2021, the VBA began an effort to transition from its existing VBA education benefits system to a Digital GI Bill platform. The agency awarded a $453 million contract to Accenture Federal Services (AFS) to support and modernize the GI Bill benefits processing system.
The agency watchdog said that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way veterans interacted with VBA and only exacerbated the need for automation and electronic services. However, when the VA OIG conducted a checkup audit to assess the program’s progress, the OIG discovered issues.
“The OIG found insufficient planning by VBA hindered development and completion of the Digital GI Bill platform and has led to significant delays and contributed to about $479 million in additional costs,” the report says.
“Of those extra contract costs, $53 million was related to a contract adjustment based on an unanticipated issue during the development of the original contract and $1 million in related costs,” it adds. “The remaining $425 million was due to a renegotiated contract, which includes legacy data migration, program management, and IT support services.”
According to the OIG, VBA failed to include staff who had the necessary technical expertise in the original contract’s development process – particularly when developing performance work statements.
As a result, the contractor said there were many delays and cost increases because “initial requirements and expectations for the platform’s development were unclear or unrealistic.” The OIG found the same to be true when conducting its audit.
The OIG also said that VBA did not follow the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) Schedule Assessment Guide, which “prescribes best practices for a project’s integrated master schedule, which plots the entire scope of the project.”
“Given the many challenges to planning and implementing the platform, VBA made contract adjustments and eventually renegotiated the original contract terms, which further delays implementation and contributes to increasing the cost of the project by $479 million, more than doubling the original contract cost of $453 million to $932 million,” the report concludes.
The OIG offered three recommendations to VBA, including that the under secretary for benefits ensure that VBA establishes a monitoring process to track implementation under the renegotiated contract.
It also recommended that the under secretary communicate regularly with the Digital GI Bill platform contractor, or ATS, to ensure that the project’s schedule is consistently updated to reflect all schedule changes for external dependencies.
Finally, the OIG said the under secretary should develop strategies to “address critical path failures to provide a clear timeline of further implementation activities.”
The VBA concurred with all three recommendations.
