VA fiduciary program comes under fire
Published: April 8, 2011
The Department of Veterans Affairs assigns independent overseers to handle the money of veterans it has declared incompetent. The question a lot of people are asking is: Who's overseeing the overseers?
The New York Times today reports that the VA has fiduciaries managing money for 111,407 veterans and other beneficiaries, with a total value of more than $3.2 billion. Since the fiduciaries earn 4 percent commissions on whatever they handle, that translates into a $128 million industry.
However, the VA Inspector General found last year that the agency wasn’t consistently going after fiduciaries who might have misused funds, and hadn’t built the systems it needed to effectively track the more than 100,000 veterans it was responsible for.
To truly understand the problem, VA critics say, you’ve got to take a look at some of the individual cases.
For example, the VA hired a convicted felon — James Hammonds, a former tax investigator for the IRS who had pleaded guilty to eight counts of tax fraud — to manage health benefits for the disabled son of a deceased veteran. What’s more, the VA apparently didn’t notice when Hammonds went to prison — or even when he died three months later. The beneficiary learned about it only after a friend decided to Google the man’s name, according to news reports last year.
The Times today reports on another case where the VA hired a man who listed his occupation as “cabinet specialist,” and said he had only a high school education to control a Korean War veteran’s benefits and life savings.
Read the full New York Times story here.
