Value Statement

As a Veteran
I want to recognize the payments in my payment history
So that I don't see confusing payments or mistake payments to 3rd parties as intended for me

Background Context

There are 2 problems on the Payments History page:

1. Ch 33 payments to educational institutions are unexpectedly displaying as if they were paid to the Veteran

• This causes Veterans to think they didn't receive money they should have and call the Contact Center or even incur expenses trying to pursue missing payments
• It's assumed that issue started in August after BGS release 6 – newly using EMPWR when CH33 came over to CorpDB

2. There are education payments incorrectly displaying as C&P Hardship

• Hypothesis: Somewhere before display on VA.gov, code 5 is being translated as C&P Hardship which is accurate for some Code 5 payments, but if the program is edu service, we should call it Education Payment or something like that
• Unknown if this is a new issue

This problem was initially flagged to Chante, and Julie has been on 2 calls with people from BGS (plus others).
We should schedule a call with two people from BGS Team 2 (Julie has contact info) for engineering discovery.

Our Contact Center contact suggests we add a warning message to VA Payment History page to reduce Veteran questions about confusing information

10/23: Julie to provide update to James Meredith and the rest of the people from the calls

Outcome

• Veterans will no longer see incorrectly categorized payments

Design

• Draft language to warn about confusing information (will need to discover if we can display only to people viewing the incorrect info or if that will take too long, should we draft language for everyone)

Enablement team (if needed)

@jstrothman

Engineering

• Add here

Out of scope

• Deciding whether it's helpful for Veterans to see payments to 3rd parties (educational institutions)

Open questions

• Add here

Tasks

• Identify staging users or other way to duplicate the issue
• Filter out payments not being made to the veteran
• Filter out Attorney Fee payments (if those are not included in the bucket above)
• Rename C&P Hardship payments being made to EDU as "Post-9/11 GI Bill"

Definition of Done

• Meets acceptance criteria
• Passed E2E testing (90% coverage)
• Passed unit testing (90% coverage)
• Passed integration testing (if applicable)
• Code reviewed (internal)
• Submitted to staging
• Team approved production verification process
• Design performs design QA and verifies the implementation matches the design spec
• Accessibility specialist performs accessibility review (in code or design)
• Engineering identifies staging users required to test and shares account and credentials with design and product
• Product performs functional QA and verifies acceptance criteria was met

Acceptance Criteria

• 3rd party payments for Ch 33 no longer display on Payment History
• C&P Hardship is no longer shown as a description of Education Payments
• Alert warning of confusing information is no longer present on the Payment History page