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House subcommittee grills VA and Accenture over delayed Chapter 35 payments after Digital GI Bill migration
Summary
A House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee probed why the VA’s Digital GI Bill migration and a 2024 decision to require manual reconciliation left tens of thousands of Chapter 35 beneficiaries waiting for fall-semester payments; VA officials described remediation steps and Accenture said automation deployed Nov. 15 has reconciled many claims.
Chairman Barrett convened the House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee to examine months of delayed education payments for Chapter 35 beneficiaries after the Department of Veterans Affairs completed the migration from the legacy Benefits Delivery Network to the Digital GI Bill (DGIB).
The hearing focused on a 2024 decision to require manual reconciliation of claims converted from the BDN, which VA witnesses said dramatically increased processing time when millions of records were migrated in August 2025. Margarita Devlin, acting principal deputy under secretary for benefits at the Veterans Benefits Administration, told the panel that timing pressures to decommission the decades‑old mainframe required the August migration and compressed testing; she said the manual reconciliation was a business decision meant to reduce improper payments but “more than doubled” processing time and left Chapter 35 — dependents and survivors education assistance — disproportionately affected.
Accenture Federal Services’ program manager for DGIB, Justin Park, told the committee the DGIB platform itself was…
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