(WAND) — On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced that veterans and survivors who apply or submit their intent to file for PACT Act benefits by 10:59 p.m CST on Monday, August 14, 2023 will be eligible to have their benefits backdated to August 10, 2022 – the day that President Biden signed the PACT Act into law.
This is an extension from the original deadline of August 9, 2023. The VA encourages all Veterans and their survivors to apply – or submit their intent to file – for PACT Act benefits now by visiting VA.gov/PACT.
The decision made to extend was made after the agency experienced technical difficulties with VA.gov/PACT in recent days. Some who have applied may have received error messages. The VA said that despite the messages, every application was successfully logged, meaning that every Veteran or survivor who has received an error message while applying for PACT Act benefits can consider their intent to file complete.
No veteran or survivor will miss out on a single day of benefits due to this issue.
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"VA has also resolved nearly all of the technical issues with VA.gov/PACT. As of 5:00 p.m., less than one tenth of one percent of attempts to submit an 'intent to file' today (August 9) had resulted in an error message," the agency announced in a statement. "This percentage is down from about 18% on August 8. Additionally, we have had a high volume of calls to VA call centers throughout this week, and we are working to decrease abnormally long call center wait times. We continue to work on these issues and will not rest until they are fully resolved."
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