A digital portal meant to connect roughly 122,700 New York City veterans with housing, employment and other services spent more than a year completely disabled, and even after it came back online, some veterans with correct login credentials still could not get in as recently as early 2026. That is the central finding of a new report from New York City Comptroller Mark Levine's office examining the troubled history of VetConnectNYC, the case management portal run by the city's Department of Veterans' Services.
The portal, first launched in 2018 to give the city's veterans a reliable way to request help, went dark in June 2024 when the Department of Veterans' Services' contract with vendor Unite USA expired. According to the Comptroller's office, the city had paid Unite USA $860,042 for the proprietary case management software between 2020 and 2024, only for the system to be switched off entirely once that deal lapsed. As amNewYork reported on the audit's release, the findings paint a picture of technology failures, procurement delays and poor vendor oversight stretching across multiple years.
With no working portal, the department was forced to process veteran service requests through Microsoft Forms while staff tracked cases manually on Excel spreadsheets, per the Comptroller's report. That workaround, which lasted from June 2024 until July 2025, meant veterans could not submit more than one service request at a time, and it prevented staff from centrally tracking complex housing and employment needs.
A New Vendor, a Missed Deadline
In September 2024, the department signed a three-year contract capped at $450,000 with vendor Combined Arms, targeting a relaunch of the portal by Veterans Day that same year. Combined Arms missed that contractually required launch date, and the portal did not come back online until July 2025 — an eight-month delay that had cost the city $268,750 through May 2026, according to the audit. Since its original 2018 launch, VetConnectNYC has received more than $2 million in total city spending.
Even after Combined Arms reactivated the system, the problems did not end. A web redirect error sent returning users to a sign-up page with no login button and no instructions, an issue the report says went uncorrected until May 2026. Veterans reported being unable to log in despite using correct credentials in early 2026, and department staff themselves experienced an inability to access some service requests during that same period.
Requests Lost or Sent to the Wrong Staff
Beyond login troubles, auditors found that the portal sometimes routed service requests to the wrong employees, changed case statuses without explanation, and in some instances failed to deliver requests to anyone at all. Department of Veterans' Services supervisory staff also lacked administrative access to areas of the system they were supposed to oversee, undercutting the kind of internal monitoring a small agency depends on to make sure cases move forward.
That vulnerability is compounded by who the portal is meant to serve. Per the Comptroller's office, nearly 54% of New York City's veterans are 65 or older, with almost 34% aged 75 or older and 71% aged 55 or older — an aging population for whom sudden design changes or system crashes can be a serious barrier rather than a mere inconvenience.
A Pattern Bigger Than One Portal
Levine framed the findings as symptomatic of a broader citywide issue rather than an isolated glitch. “New York City has a mandate to modernize its systems,” Levine said, adding that “New York City owes veterans a government that works.” He described VetConnectNYC as part of a pattern of outdated city systems that fail to perform or rely too heavily on poorly supervised third parties, calling the portal a target for modernization.
This is not the first time the department's internal operations have drawn scrutiny. A separate Comptroller audit released in December 2025 found that the Department of Veterans' Services operated without formalized standard operating procedures for housing assistance until November 25, 2025, when it finally issued a Housing and Supportive Services Policy Manual. That earlier review similarly found the agency relying on interim spreadsheets to manage housing intake throughout fiscal year 2025.
The Department of Veterans' Services is one of the city's smallest agencies, operating with just 36 full-time staff and a $6.1 million annual budget — less than 0.01% of the total municipal budget — while coordinating services for well over 100,000 local veterans. The agency was created in 2016 under City Council Local Law 113 of 2015, making it the first standalone municipal department in the country dedicated solely to veterans.
Recommendations and Next Steps
The Comptroller's office issued a set of recommendations, including stronger enforcement of vendor requirements, improved performance metrics, annual performance evaluations, and regular feedback loops from veterans and service providers. According to Levine's office, the Department of Veterans' Services agreed with the recommendations. The department has not responded to amNewYork's request for comment on the findings.
Levine assumed office as the city's 52nd Comptroller on January 1, 2026, succeeding Brad Lander after previously serving as Manhattan Borough President, according to FOX 5 NY. His office's review of VetConnectNYC signals that municipal technology performance and vendor oversight will remain a recurring focus of his fiscal watchdog agenda, particularly for small agencies like the Department of Veterans' Services that depend heavily on third-party systems to serve vulnerable populations.
