Elizabeth Oomps, wife of retired Marine Maj. Lloyd Oomps, accompanied her husband to a medical appointment Nov. 7 at the Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Cambridge, Maryland, 96 miles from the couple's home in picturesque Onancock, Virginia.
Immediately following the visit, she popped a paper travel claim into the facility's depository and waited for the reimbursement. When it hadn't come by Dec. 29, she struggled with the VA's online travel reimbursement system to attempt to refile the claim, and when that didn't work, made a few phone calls.
That's when she learned that her husband would not get reimbursed for gas and mileage, because the electronic claim wasn't submitted within 30 days of his appointment.
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“I didn't know about the 30 days,” Elizabeth Oomps said in an email last month to Military.com. “This is SO UNFAIR, and even [though] I have tried EVERYTHING to show that we didn't know about the 30 days, they will not pay the mileage.”
Between the end of a pandemic-era flexibility for veterans to submit travel claims at any time, the challenges posed by the VA's app-based travel claims system for some veterans, and the removal of filing kiosks that relied on an older system from medical facilities, veterans continue to have trouble filing travel reimbursement claims, with some simply giving up and paying…
