Do We Have Any Legal Recourse to Pursue Concerning My Daughter’s GI Bill?
Q: My daughter is currently attending the Paul Mitchell School and it has been added to the VA’s list of accredited institutions. The financial aid person at the school she attends has no idea how the VA attendance verification works and refuses to take the time to learn more about it. My daughter has been asking her since she started school to verify her attendeance to no avail. Her benefits payments would have amounted to well over $6,000.00 now. How can we get the person at her school to verify her attendance? Do we have any legal recourse to pursue? Thank you!
A: If you are talking about the Post 9/11 GI Bill, what should have happened is your daughter should have requested her Certificate of Eligibility from the VA by submitting VA Form 22-1990, if it is her GI Bill, or VA Form 22-1990e if she is using transferred benefits. Then she should have handed the school Registrar a copy of her certificate when she registered for school.
In turn, the school then sends a Certificate of Enrollment on her behalf that tells the VA she is registered for school. It is this certificate that triggers the start of the payment process. The school gets their tuition and your daughter gets her monthly housing allowance and book stipend.
However, if your daughter is using the Montgomery GI Bill, she has to verify her enrollment monthly herself. She does that by going through the WAVE system. If she does not verify her enrollment at the end of each month, she will not get paid.
To me this sounds like the GI Bill she may be using. Is she paying her own tuition? Under the MGIB, she has to pay her own tuition, but she would get up to $1,648 per month from the VA.
I think your daughter is using the MGIB and paying her own tuition, but has not verified her enrollment through WAVE. I doubt her school has been waiting on their money this long.
Under VA policy, she could go back up to one year and request reimbursement. I suggests that she does this by sending in a letter to the VA. Another resource for her to use is each school has a trained VA Certifying Official which could help her with her issue whether it is a monthly verification issue or an issue with the financial aid person.
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