The Veterans Health Administration has for the first time acknowledged publicly that software problems with its Online Health Care Application on Vets.gov caused tens of thousands of veteran applications to be locked or lost in the process, forcing the agency to disable the app and pay employees overtime to manually work through the applications. […]

In August, as President Barack Obama stood in front of the Disabled American Veterans Convention and publicly hailed the success of a new health care enrollment app on Vets.gov, the system had actually been spinning out of control for months, losing thousands of applications, locking records, and allowing officials to mark veterans ineligible for benefits without legal justification, according to hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by MeriTalk. […]