A veteran struggles to learn what happened to his mortgage overpayments. He seeks help from Chase Bank and the Pentagon’s Defense Finance Accounting Services. But he can’t get them to listen.

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Vester Owens had a complaint unlike any I’ve heard. The retired 88-year-old Air Force sergeant believed he had accidentally overpaid his home mortgage. Not by a little, either. After his house, which he bought in 1953, was paid off in 1973, payments continued to be deducted from his military allotment until 2009.

When he discovered the error two years ago, he and his family believed that he had overpaid by more than $30,000.

“The question is, where’s the money?” asks his nephew, Darryl Owens, who contacted me.

Vester Owens found some of it. He complained to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which handles retirees’ pay for 2.3 million veterans, including him. Once the service learned that he is still alive, it returned $3,500 in overpayments.

Since then, he has tried to get the rest. But Owens, who had a long career in the military and then owned a vending machine company, kept running into the stone wall of big bureaucracy. He was dealing with two massive institutions, and he couldn’t get anybody’s attention.

Aside from dealing with Defense Finance, the Pentagon’s payment arm, he was also pleading with Chase bank, which had come to own the old Texas Commerce Bank, where Owens kept his accounts.

He showed me letters he had sent to both institutions. Nobody would help him solve the mystery. But Owens never gave up.

“My uncle is from the old school,” Darryl Owens says. “He believes that talking to people will get things solved. But we hit a wall. My uncle is 88, and his health is failing, and he’d like to get it resolved.”

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Vester Owens told me how the mistake happened. He originally set up part of his military pay to get split into two payments of $70 each: one for his mortgage, the other for a savings account.

Owens was saving for a rainy day, his nephew says. “The best way to save is to set something up and forget about it. He pays all his bills through an automatic debit. So he forgets. It’s his fault, obviously. He forgot to stop his mortgage payments from coming out of his military retirement pay.”

While Owens continued to see the deduction from his pay, he assumed it was for the savings account. The similar numbers confused him.

He didn’t realize what happened until he received a letter listing his allotments. He saw a mortgage payment listed, but he knew that he had paid off his house.

Defense Finance told him that about a dozen checks that were supposed to go into his account were sitting in a drawer waiting for him. Turns out that Texas Commerce’s old post office box had expired. The post office returned the checks to the military, and the military didn’t know what to do with them.

That led to his receiving the $3,500. But it made him suspicious about what happened to the rest of the payments.

I set out to help him find the $30,000. I pushed hard for answers but made little progress. After three weeks, Defense Finance said it couldn’t connect with a Chase staffer working on Owens’ case.

A Defense Finance military pay technician wrote Owens last week that he performed a Google search for Texas Commerce Bank and dialed a number but that it was disconnected. Then he talked to someone at a Chase branch in Fort Worth who “would only speak in generalities, no specifics, because of privacy issues.”

Finally, with the help of Chase spokesman Greg Hassel and Defense Finance spokesman Steve Burghardt, we hooked the two institutions together to work on Owens’ case.

Days later, we got an answer. The money was in the unlikeliest of places: under Owens’ nose.

Chase reports that after a search of old records, a few documents that were found show that the overpayments were placed in Owens’ old Texas Commerce Bank account all those years. He didn’t realize it because the payments were both $70. But the money was in an account that owned.

Owens probably never noticed because of his philosophy of sending money to a savings account and forgetting about it, his nephew says.

“People need to keep track of their military pay allotment,” Burghardt says. “It helps them out. It helps us out. It helps the banks out. It helps everybody.”

One reason the case was difficult to solve was because banks aren’t required to keep records forever. When a bank’s ownership changes, finding older records becomes doubly hard.

Additionally, Defense Finance usually doesn’t communicate with banks on such matters, but it says it made an exception because of Owens’ unusual problem.

Good thing. The money turned out to be in a safe place.

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is available in hardcover, as a CD audio book, ebook and hey, what else do you need. Visit our store. Now revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

Many U.S. employers say they are confused about a federal law that requires they hold a job for a returning veteran who previously worked for them before going to war. But one unemployed veteran says there should be no confusion about it.

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Sometimes Bruce Grove says he wishes he were back fighting for the Texas Army National Guard in Iraq rather than dealing with his problem at home in Lewisville, Texas.

After three tours of duty during two wars in Iraq, Grove, 46, wanted to return to his life as on-site property manager for a self-storage facility. His wife ran the operation while he was away.

But on Sept. 11, 2008 — “of all days,” Grove says — his wife received a letter that he had been terminated. The facility’s owner, The Assured Group, had sold the Lewisville property to another company.

Grove had to take a quick leave from training in Georgia to rush home and move his wife and son into an apartment. When he returned from Iraq a year later, he asked his company for a similar job.

The federal Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act requires companies to rehire veterans who worked for them before deployment. So Grove believed that he had a strong argument. The law says the new job must be equal in pay, seniority and benefits. (Here is an easy-to-read government guide about the law.)

As readers of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Dave Lieber Watchdog column first learned, the company told him no. In a lengthy interview with Watchdog Nation, Blair Valk, operations director and daughter of company founder Don Valk, detailed how she handled Grove’s complaint.

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“Bruce kept saying: ‘I’m coming back. What do you have available?’

“I said: ‘Honestly, we don’t have anything. Your job doesn’t exist anymore.’ We can’t leave something open for 30 or 60 days. If we have a vacancy, we have to fill it.”

She researched the Reemployment Rights Act.

“I’m educating myself. I just called the agency directly protecting him and asked, ‘Please help me understand what I’m supposed to do.’”

She said she talked to several officials but didn’t note who they were.

“I’m doing it all myself. I didn’t use an attorney. We’re a family-owned company. I used the Internet, called the agencies and spoke to their help lines.

“They all determined the same thing: ‘You don’t have any obligation. … I feel very secure it’s not a violation.”

Under law, veterans can complain to the Labor Department, which can mediate the dispute. After that, veterans can take the case to federal court and get government representation for free. Or veterans can sue on their own.

If the matter turns into a lawsuit, the company would likely use one part of the law as its defense. “Reemployment of a person is excused if an employer’s circumstances have changed so that reemployment of the person would be impossible or unreasonable,” a government summary of the law says. “A reduction-in-force that would have included the person would be an example.”

Grove says that The Assured Group owns other self-storage properties in North Texas and that a comparable job could be found. The company also owns business parks and has a realty division, according to its website.

“The company still has to provide me a job — maybe not the same job but picking weeds or cleaning bathrooms at the same salary and seniority that I had.”

In a recommendation letter Grove provided to me, a company official writes that he was a model employee. It also calls him “a tremendous asset,” “highly-motivated” and “always warm and cheerful.”

Grove has hired a law firm owned by federal employment lawyer Patrick McLain. McLain said the company official I interviewed erred by doing her own research and not seeking legal advice.

“That’s how people get in trouble,” he said. The company’s problem, he said, is that it owns other facilities and that Grove could have been hired elsewhere.

Garnet Murphey of Southlake alerted The Watchdog to Grove’s struggle. The daughter of a World War II prisoner of war, she has a keen interest in veterans issues.

“Is this the way we should treat the heroes that protect us?” she asks.

“He’s been having a hard time. He thought he had a job. He’s been struggling ever since. He’s depressed, but he doesn’t make it obvious. He’s a trouper.”

Grove says he is speaking out because he wants to be “the frontman to bring this a little more public awareness. I’ve been approached by a lot of soldiers with the same problem. We’re supposed to suck it up and move forward. I was wronged here. I’m not going to lay down on this.”

Online: www.dol.gov/vets

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is available in hardcover, as a CD audio book, ebook and hey, what else do you need. Visit our store. Now revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

Shaylynn Lynch was an aspiring actress in high school, but when she didn’t get any college scholarships for drama in 2004, she decided to follow a family tradition and serve her country.

She joined the Navy and made a promise to herself that she would go to college later — at the government’s expense under the GI Bill.

The petty officer third class served four years, including more than a year in combat, as an aviation electronics specialist on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

After she returned to civilian life last summer, she signed up for the new Post-9-11 GI Bill and kept her promise, studying drama and film at the University of North Texas. But money from the government to pay for tuition, books and fees and her housing allowance didn’t come for three months.

She finally received a check for some of it in November but was still owed thousands more. The 23-year-old veteran fell behind in her bills and had to take out loans to cover her expenses.

She called the Department of Veterans Affairs, she estimates, more than 30 times.

“There were no answers for months at a time,” she said. “I asked to speak to someone higher up, and they said no. I wanted a timeline, but I wasn’t getting any answers other than, ‘We’re working on it.’”

The VA was flooded with benefits requests last year when the new GI Bill went into effect in August. It couldn’t keep up.

Across the nation, stories are told of veterans evicted because they couldn’t pay rent and others who dropped out of college while waiting for checks.

Lynch is one of tens of thousands of veterans waiting for benefits due them.

While VA officials say they’re working on the backlog, no one disagrees that thousands have been left — borrowing a phrase from Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki — worrying about their finances when they should have been focused on their schoolwork.

When the program went into effect, the government processed 2,000 claims a day. Now, after hiring extra workers, the VA says it can handle 7,000 a day.

“Our primary mission at the VA is to be an advocate for veterans,” VA spokesman Drew Brookie said. “And we fully share concerns about timeliness of benefits claims processing. No one should have an adversarial relationship with the VA.”

Veterans groups say many claims are processed by hand. The new budget proposed by President Barack Obama this week includes $44 million to complete an automated system by December for processing claims.

To help students, the VA also made advance emergency payments of up to $3,000 to claimants who desperately needed money. The VA announced last month that it has begun applying the advanced payments to student accounts.

In a noteworthy event, the VA also announced that it has closed its call centers on Thursdays and Fridays so workers can process more claims instead of handling phone calls. That means VA call centers are only open three days a week.

The VA beefed up its work force, too. In the past year, 760 people were hired and overtime was “maximized,” the VA said.

How did this happen?

The VA was forced to set up the program much quicker than usual, said Skip Kempnich, a board member for the National Association of Veterans’ Program Administrators. Confusion abounded because the VA’s instructions to college administrators were vague and kept changing, said Kempnich, who works at the University of Iowa.

Compounding the problem, the VA’s campus liaisons were called back in from the field to process claims, so campus administrators had as much difficulty as Lynch did trying to find out what was happening.

Tuition money is sent directly to schools, with the other benefits going to students. At UNT, the registrar’s office said students such as Lynch were not penalized. Officials knew the money was coming and made loans available to hold students over.

After her discharge, Lynch turned down lucrative electronics jobs to pursue her dream. She hopes to become a film director.

This week, she went to her mailbox and found a long-awaited check from the VA. But Lynch says she’s not sure whether everything has been paid. The form letter did not include a breakdown of the various benefits and their amounts.

When I pointed this out to Brookie, the VA spokesman, he agreed to fetch Lynch’s records and provide her with a breakdown.

The experience frustrates her, she said. “I don’t like asking for handouts, but this was something that was promised to me.”

Her grandfather, Air Force veteran Chuck Kedy, who first notified Watchdog Nation about the problem, said, “It really upsets me when they don’t take care of the kids when they serve their country.”

Final note: A veteran friend of mine, Anthony Martinez, a talented writer and photographer, wrote a terrific blog post recently on how to deal with the VA. And thank you Anthony for your great note: “The copy of Watchdog Nation you signed for me last year helped me get results (and write those posts). Thanks.” (That’s what Watchdog Nation wants to do!) Read Anthony’s great ideas here.

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber