VA mistakes smother Post-9/11 GI Bill spouse - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

VA mistakes smother Post-9/11 GI Bill spouse

An Army spouse using transferred GI Bill benefits to attend veterinary school is worried that she won’t be able to attend college this fall because of problems with overpayments.

Angela Kargus, a student at Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, has a canceled check to show she repaid money she should never have received, but the Veterans Affairs Department has credited her with returning only part of the money and is threatening to withhold additional benefits unless she agrees to a repayment plan.

She has enlisted the help of Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kan., to try resolve the problem before the fall term begins Aug. 23.

Jenkins’ spokeswoman, Mary Geiger, confirmed that a caseworker is helping Kargus. Brownback aides did not respond to requests for information about their involvement.

VA officials do not comment on problems involving individual students. But in congressional testimony, VA officials have said there are procedures for reviewing possible errors in payments and that the VA inspector general is looking into complaints about collection procedures for overpayments.

“The bottom line is that I want to pay back what I owe and for the VA to pay my fall tuition,” Kargus said. “It’s not like I am asking for a pony for Christmas.”

Kargus is not the only one with overpayment and repayment problems. The House of Representatives voted July 28 to set aside $100,000 in the 2011 budget for VA to pay for a report on how it accounts for payments and repayments. Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind., sponsored the amendment ordering the study, saying he has heard many complaints.

“I understand that VA legitimately requires some payments to veterans and universities to be returned,” he said. “There can be instances of a student taking fewer classes than what was originally thought, accidently duplication payments. This is reasonable, to an extent.”

The trouble, he said, is that veterans and schools have difficulty getting an accurate accounting of the payments and collections.

“In some instances, this has resulted in VA withholding further Post-9/11 educational benefit payments to the student in question as they are credited with an outstanding debt, despite having already paid back the necessary accounts,” Hill said, describing a situation exactly like what Kargus faces.

“This is even after the returned checks have been cashed by the VA,” Hill said — again, exactly what Kargus said happened to her.

The report Hill requested, added to the 2011 VA funding bill by voice vote, would be due by Jan. 1, which would be too late for Kargus to be guaranteed funding for her fall term at Kansas State University.

Kargus, the wife of Fort Riley, Kan.-based Army Capt. Brian Kargus, said three separate mistakes in calculating her benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill resulted in her receiving almost $13,000 she did not deserve last year as veterinary school student. This included an error she reported to VA last fall, just as the Post-9/11 GI Bill was being launched, when she received a living stipend and book allowance payment.

Those payments are not supposed to go to spouses of active-duty members.

As soon as she received the check on Oct. 7, Kargus knew it was a mistake.

“We had studied the benefits, and knew as the spouse of an active-duty soldier that I wasn’t entitled to a living stipend or book allowance,” she said. “I knew we had to give it back. I did everything I could to correct this.”

Giving it back, however, proved difficult. Kargus said she made her first call to the VA to notify them of the error on Oct. 14, but received little help. There were no procedures in place at the time to collect overpayments and her efforts to get the payments stopped also were unsuccessful.

“Every time I would call VA and ask them to please stop the payments, I was told that no mechanism was in place to resolve the issue and that I shouldn’t send them any additional repayments because it would only clog the system,” she said.

Knowing she would have to return the money, she put it into a separate bank account so it would be available.

“I figured at some point they would fix it,” she said.

In addition to errantly receiving the living stipend and book allowance, Kargus had additional problems that caused overpayments of tuition, including an error in calculating the number of credits she was taking, that were fixed with the help of university officials.

Earlier this year, VA officials finally recognized the overpayment and began asking for the money back, Kargus said.

“I started receiving collection letters from the debt management center, all for varying amounts of money,” she said. At one point, the VA demanded $9,485, but she wanted to see an itemized bill before paying.

“I didn’t expect an audit to take six months, but it did,” she said. “The average American wouldn’t pay their credit card bill without seeing an itemized bill, so why should someone pay VA thousands of dollars without knowing exactly how much they owed and for what?”

To get the itemized statement, Kargus said she enlisted the help of Brownback and Jenkins. She said Brownback and Jenkins received answers from different offices, which had different explanations of payments but had the same bottom line: Kargus owed $2,140. She sent the check in July, and it was cashed, which she hoped would end her problems.

It didn’t work out that way. She said she got a receipt showing only $1,356 was credited to her overpayment, with no explanation of what happened to the missing $791.

On Aug. 4, Kargus got another bill from VA saying she still owed $791 — which happens to be the amount of the book allowance she received in August — and warning that if she didn’t repay the full amount immediately or agree to pay $66 a month, she could be denied benefits until the debt is repaid.

“They won’t pay my fall tuition, and yet they already have the money,” she said.

She has refused to sign the agreement or make another payment, and has congressional offices trying to help her get to the bottom of the problem and to get there quickly.

“I really don’t know what else to do,” she said. “I don’t want to pay the $791 again, because I have no guarantee it is going to be credited to me, and I don’t want to sign an agreement to pay $66 a month for something I have already paid.”

Kargus said she believes her problem will be worked out but worries about what her woes say about the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

“I can understand there were startup problems last year but the program is now a year old. I’m just trying to do the right thing and they are not making it easy. This could have been so much easier,” she said, complaining, in particular, about difficulties getting help from VA.

Like others, Kargus said she had problems last year when trying to call a GI Bill hotline established by VA to get answers to her questions. She said she called as often as 15 times in one day without getting through to anyone. VA officials acknowledged short staff and equipment problems made it hard to get through. When calls were answered, Kargus said the VA workers “were courteous but did not have the power to do anything about my problems.”

“I feel strongly that my husband and I took all the possible steps to resolve this issue as quickly as possible, yet we are still dealing with the situation 10 months later,” Kargus said.

“I worry about other service members and their families who may have also received overpayments and either didn’t understand the regulation and then spent the money unknowingly, or signed one of VA’s “Agreement to Pay Indebtedness” unconscionable contracts.”

The “worst part,” she said, is that none of the overpayments are due to anything she did wrong.

“I have taken every possible step to return the money,” she said, wondering if her honesty in telling VA in October that she was getting money she did not deserve “has only made resolving the situation more difficult.”