Review of Alleged System Access Failures for Veterans’ to VBA’s eBenefits Program

We conducted this review to determine the merits of a complaint alleging that veterans’ eBenefits accounts did not allow appropriate system access. The complainant alleged that, during the April/May 2014 timeframe, previously submitted claims could not be tracked. Additionally, the complainant stated VA was unable to assist with resolving the issue. We could not determine the reason the complainant experienced this difficulty with system access. Our review verified that there were no planned outages during the time the veteran experienced access trouble, though there were numerous issues that could have caused this effect, such as system hardware failures, interconnection issues with VA external partners, or password input issues. After we initiated our review, we contacted the complainant, who stated that he had subsequently received assistance from VA eBenefits support staff, was no longer experiencing eBenefits login issues, and was satisfied with eBenefits performance. We did not make any recommendations since the issue was not determined to a systemic problem.