. >> and since commissioner cleland just joined us, i want to give her the opportunity to speak. all right. so we can move onto second round of questions. does anyone have further questions? commissioner friedberg. >> thank you very much. i want to follow the line of questioning so i understand what you're saying. am i correct in understanding, first, that tik tok is not unique in the techniques it's using or the kinds of data that it's collecting on americans, is that right? >> it's very similar to others. there's some uniqueness that we observed is that it tends to -- it sometimes collects more information than other vendors or other data brokers do collect. >> so, but principally what seems to be different about it or concerning about it is the volume you said, i don't know, 7.5%, i don't remember what the number was, are there other companies or platforms that are in the same league in terms of the volume of information? >> absolutely, yes. other companies collect are collected on even more websites and dominant players such as alphabet and meta and others and the concern wit

and debt collections on hold while we were to exercise the authorities available to us under the cleland-dole act. >> i yield back. >> i now recognize ranking member, excuse me, representative salt, from texas. >> thank you, mr. chairman. do you think that watchtower is quality control? >> yes, i would say that we are designing it so that we have more confidence in the specific health of any feature at any time. va.gov has so many aspects of this would give us a way to know, more proactively, if there is any issue happening affecting any one of those features. >> i disagree with you. what you said is you are monitoring the health of your functions. that is what i disagree with. everything we hear, again, is process. i hear very little about the veterans. i am talking about the quality of the control that should be exercised and the determinations. and we have had other briefings about the appeals board and all of that. but this is my problem, i disagree that watchtower is quality control on the issues we are addressing today. we are talking about access here, why can these live forms not keep

we are looking to exercise the authorities available to us other under the cleland old act prevent from acuring. while we're working codify into regulation. we have some policies that are being reviewed by the secretary. and those decisions will be coming out soon >> could you explain for people who might be watching because a lot of the veterans became anxious. i want to make sure and make clear that we have it. >> it prohibits v.a. for creating a debt for veterans when it's an action that's due on part of the v.a. and delay in the processing time that's the authority that we're using in this situation. to not only put those debt on hold while we put that interim policy in place, but to insure that no future debt are a result of issues like this. very there a population of veterans that you don't have authority to forgive? >> not that i'm aware of. however due to the complexities to some of the policy components i would like to work with you and your staff to make sure we bring some policy experts to speak about this more intelligently than i would. >> how have these veterans acquired