A computer glitch dating back 12 years has led to widows of war veterans being underpaid or not paid their entitlements. The Veterans Affairs Department is now faced with back-paying the entitlements, totalling millions of dollars.
A 1996 law gives veterans' spouses the right to keep their partners' final month of benefits. It instructed the VA to make changes to comply with the law, which took effect for spouses of veterans who died after Dec. 31, 1996.
Apparently however the necessary updates to the payments software was never made, leading to the underpayments.
But the VA never updated the automated computer systems that send out checks and notification letters. As a result, widows were either denied the final month of payment or asked to send the checks back. In many cases, if the checks were deposited or spent, the Treasury Department moved to seize the money directly from the widows' accounts.
According to the Honolulu Advertiser, a Maui widow was the unwitting instigator of the repayments.
Her husband, Raymond Fusao Sasaoka, fought in the Korean War with the U.S. Army and lost his hearing during the conflict. After he died at age 76 in 2007, Sasaoka used her husband's final benefit check of $2,669 to pay for his funeral expenses.
The computer error resulted in Veterans Affairs taking the money back, seizing it from her bank account. Her contacting her local Senator resulted in the error being identified.
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