11 September 2026
A veteran outside the team read the site and picked it apart. All seven of her notes are in this release, along with a round of review that found six things broken and five published claims that were not true.
New
- Your documents live here. A DD-214, rating decision letters, treatment records: they are encrypted in your browser before they upload, and the text of a PDF can be read without the file leaving your device.
- A Report a problem button inside your claim file. Your email address goes with it only if you ask to be contacted back.
- The intake uses VA's own lists for exposures, hazards, conditions, symptom frequency, discharge type, states and countries, so an answer here is an answer the 526EZ accepts.
- Veterans living outside the United States can finish the address section. A country VA does not list is accepted and marked, rather than refused.
- The site now says what it does for you, instead of asking you to find what is missing. Back pain brings nerve pain and joint problems with it, and where you served can make a condition presumed service connected. Finding those is our job.
Things that were broken
Found by review before anyone ran into them.
- A veteran who signed up a second time was shown a recovery code that did not unlock their account, on a screen telling them to save it. Replacing a real code and later forgetting the passphrase would have lost the case file with no way back.
- Opening a document left it readable after the idle timer locked the screen.
- An interrupted upload could leave an encrypted copy that nothing in the app could delete, while the interface said deleting erases everything.
- Fourteen Agent Orange presumptive conditions stopped matching, because the regulation names the Korean DMZ one way and VA's form spells it out another.
- Two claims worded alike with different diagnostic codes collapsed into one, so your report and your clinician's packet could name different conditions and one claim would vanish.
- Sign-up answered measurably faster for an email address with no account, which is enough to test a list of addresses against the site.
Claims we removed because they were not true
These were published on this site. None were said on purpose, and all of them were live.
- That a document sent for reading goes to an artificial-intelligence provider under a zero-retention agreement. There is no such agreement, and the feature was switched off, so the page promised a guarantee that did not exist for something that did not run.
- That we record which pages you visit. There is no analytics code in this site at all.
- That deleting your account happens immediately, in one action. It is two steps, and it can leave documents behind and tell you so.
- That your documents sit behind our storage provider's access control. They do not. What protects them is that they are encrypted with a key we never hold.
- Notes written to a lawyer, left in brackets, rendered in the privacy policy and in the consent document you are asked to accept.
Built and switched off
- Reading your documents to fill in the intake is built and switched off. Turning it on requires a written retention agreement with the provider, recorded in a file this site checks before it will run. Until then nothing you upload goes anywhere.
Still open
- Two pages still answer faster for an address that has an account. Closing it properly means holding every answer for a fixed time.