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This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

It started in 2017 with a group of friends and colleagues—the first 40 clients whom US Army veterans Scott Greenblatt and Bill Taylor signed up to help.

They had come home from combat zones weary and weakened by illness and injury, with a promise of monthly disability payments from the country they served. But first, they had to navigate the lumbering bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Soon, those 40 veterans grew to 275 a month. Then 275 soared to 500. Last year, Taylor and Greenblatt’s company Veterans Guardian assisted about 30,000 veterans with benefits claims, according to Taylor. “We have your back,” the company’s website says. “Together we can uncover all the benefits you deserve.” 

The one problem with their success story: Veterans Guardian’s business model runs afoul of the law, lawmakers and attorneys general across the country say. But nobody has been able to stop them. 

With no accreditation, the company is charging veterans thousands of dollars for guidance that veterans service organizations and other nonprofits advise vets on for free. 

A whistleblower lawsuit from one of Veterans Guardian’s former employees claims the firm’s business practices are “permeated with fraud and deceit” and cheating the federal government out of millions of dollars. A lawsuit filed by veterans alleges the company “preys on disabled veterans by unfairly and deceptively taking tens of millions of dollars of their disability benefits in violation of federal law.”

Lawmakers in nearly 40 states and Congress have moved to crack down on unaccredited companies like Veterans Guardian that are part of an industry that has only grown since the 2022 PACT Act led to the largest expansion of veterans benefits in decades. And, the Department of Veterans Affairs warned the firm back in 2019 in a cease and desist letter that it “is prohibited by law from assisting Veterans in the preparation, presentation, or prosecution of their VA benefits.” A congressional oversight panel rebuked Veterans Guardian three years later for denying such a letter even existed.

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But instead of backing down, the Pinehurst, North Carolina-based company is spending millions of dollars to fight back—an indication, experts say, of just how much money is at stake in the highly politicized world of veterans benefits. One of Veterans Guardian’s competitors estimated in a 2021 SEC filing that the VA claims consulting market was worth a staggering $73 billion a year. 

“Numerous large companies are siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars a year in veterans benefits,” Rep. Morgan McGarvey, a Democrat from Kentucky, said last month during a hearing on Capitol Hill, “all to make a quick dollar on what has for decades been a free service.”

The War Horse reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings, campaign finance records, and lobbying disclosures from two dozen states across the political spectrum and interviewed current and former employees to map out how Veterans Guardian courts veterans and wields influence on Capitol Hill and state capitals across the country.

The investigation found Veterans Guardian stood out from its peers by spending $2.3 million in the last three years to lobby Congress and hundreds of thousands more on lobbying state legislators.

But in an hour-long interview with The War Horse, Taylor passionately defended Veterans Guardian, insisting VA’s beleaguered benefits claims system is the real problem. Veterans are paying the price, he said, and companies like his are offering veterans a choice. He said 70 percent of Veterans Guardian’s clients have already tried to use a VA-accredited free service, like those provided by Disabled American Veterans and Veterans of Foreign Wars, to apply for benefits. 

“If they know the free services are there and they’ve used them and they’re still coming to me,” he said, “that tells you that there’s something wrong.” 

Leslie Carico had been working as a document control specialist at Veterans Guardian for about five months in May 2019 when she began discussing concerns with a coworker. It wasn’t long before “disloyalty” cost her the job, according to a whistleblower lawsuit she filed in 2020.

Her dramatic claims emerged last year when the US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina unsealed the case. In a complaint that spans more than 60 pages, she detailed how Veterans Guardian “hijacks the application process, wresting control of it from the veteran” with a “singular focus”: a 100 percent disability rating for the maximum VA benefit possible so the company can charge the largest commission.

Among the alleged tactics, according to the lawsuit: 

Claims strategists with no medical background interviewed veterans and quickly assessed which health issues should be listed on their forms.

The company referred veterans to the same psychologist for remote exams— sometimes conducted by the psychologist’s family members—and mental health forms were auto-populated with identical checkmarks.

Employees changed scores on depression self-evaluations if they felt the score was too low, sometimes without the veterans’ knowledge.  

Applicants were coached to look “tired and shabby” for appointments with VA medical examiners. They were advised not to shave, told to use a cane or wheelchair if they had one, and to use buzz words such as “depressed,” “sad,” and “no motivation.” 

Veterans Guardian employees routinely tacked on secondary conditions like erectile dysfunction and headaches to a veteran’s diagnosis if resubmitting an application was necessary.

Employees were instructed to tell prospective customers that the VA “could not be trusted to deal with veterans fairly. Misrepresentations may have to be made.”

The reason that the company went to these lengths, Carico’s lawsuit said, was simple: money. The company charged a one-time fee of five times the amount of a veteran’s monthly disability benefit increase. For a veteran going from a 0 to 100 percent rating, this could amount to up to $4,500 a month—a payout of more than $22,000 for Veterans Guardian. The company charged nothing to a veteran who received no benefit rating increase, but this was rare. In interviews with The War Horse, three former employees said the company “cherry-picked” who to help, turning away veterans who did not have a strong case. 

Carico’s lawyers did not make her available for an interview with The War Horse. But two current and four former Veterans Guardian employees said in interviews they had seen many of Carico’s claims firsthand.

Bill Taylor, left, and Scott Greenblatt, both U.S. Army retired lieutenant colonels, started Veterans Guardian in 2017. C-SPAN/Ted Fitzgerald/The Pilot

When asked about Carico’s lawsuit, a Veterans Guardian spokesperson said in a statement, “This complaint was filed by a former employee who was terminated for toxic behavior and has since been accused of harassment and cyberstalking other Veterans Guardian employees.”

In an emailed statement to The War Horse, Carico’s lawyers called the allegation baseless, “designed to discredit a whistleblower revealing serious fraud,” and “a familiar tactic used against women who speak truth to power.” 

Taylor wouldn’t directly address the lawsuit in the interview. He called accusations that the company “cherry-picked” clients “categorically false” and said the average one-time fee Veterans Guardian makes from a veteran is less than $4,000.

“I might be able to convince one or two people, maybe three to do something nefarious,” Taylor said in his interview with The War Horse. “There is no way I can convince this many people to cheat veterans, to take advantage of veterans. We’re proud of what we do.” 

At first, so were the Veterans Guardian current and former employees who spoke to The War Horse on the condition they would not be named because they feared they would lose their jobs or experience retaliation. All six of them said they joined the company because they wanted to help veterans. Each was a veteran themself or a military family member. “Some veterans come back to you and say, ‘I got my increase, I went from 10 to 90 percent, my family is saved,’” one of the former employees said. “I was brought to tears a lot of times by the work that we did.” 

Yet during that employee’s time at the company, things started to change. “We just felt there was a little more greed,” the former employee said. “It really became about statistics, quotas, the numbers.” 

Before January, employees who booked more than 70 mental health appointments with veterans each month could be eligible for a $30,000 annual bonus, according to a company employment offer letter reviewed by The War Horse. Under a new pay structure, however, a company contract reviewed by The War Horse states that employees become ineligible for full bonuses if their calls with veterans run longer than eight minutes. 

“Do I make any extra money and try to provide for my kids better?” one of the current employees said in an interview. “Or do I give these veterans the time and the attention that they deserve? That’s our option.” 

It might be hard to imagine that a veteran would willingly pay thousands of dollars to a company when they could get help from a lawyer or veterans service organization for free. But for some veterans entangled in VA’s bureaucracy, it might seem like a fair price. 

“The VA disability claims process is horribly broken, it’s not well run, and it can be very despairing and understandably discouraging for veterans,” said Rose Carmen Goldberg, a lawyer accredited by VA to assist with benefit claims who also serves as associate director at the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford University. 

An influx of veterans filing for benefits since the PACT Act has strained the system, which has had a backlog of disability claims for years. As of March 2025, there were more than 240,000 cases in the queue. It can take an average of four and a half months for a decision on a claim. And with the Trump administration’s deep cuts across the federal government underway, veterans advocates fear things will get worse.

“I think that’s part of why these companies can be so alluring,” Goldberg said, “because they make promises about high success rates and speed.” 

If an accredited agent acts unethically or makes a mistake on a claims submission then they are responsible. But lawyers and advocates warn that veterans could be the ones on the hook if any of the medical claims in their packets turn out to be fabricated or overstated by a claims consulting company. 

No matter who helps a veteran file for benefits, all claims are sent to the same VA offices to be reviewed and processed by the same people, said Mike Figlioli, director of VFW National Veterans Service. VFW is one of the nonprofit groups advocating against Veterans Guardian in Congress and state legislatures. 

“I think veterans that either had a bad experience with VA or a VSO think that these people have some kind of magic bullet, but there isn’t,” Figlioli said. “There’s nothing that cuts down on the processing time. What there is, is a potential for fraud.” 

Mike Figlioli, director of VFW National Veterans Service, has been testifying against Veterans Guardian and other for-profit claims consultants in Congress and state legislatures. Photo courtesy of VFW

Veterans Guardian is among a growing group of “claims consulting” companies—called “claim sharks” by opponents—that the VA says are operating outside of the law because they aren’t accredited to perform the work and shouldn’t be charging for their services.

Trajector Medical, Veteran Benefits Guide, and VA Claims Insider are just some of Veterans Guardian’s competitors—and, in some cases, its allies. In 2023, Veterans Guardian joined forces with Veteran Benefits Guide to create a new trade organization: the National Association for Veterans Rights, helmed by Peter O’Rourke, who served as acting secretary for Veterans Affairs during President Trump’s first term.  

“Veterans are making conscious, informed decisions to seek help outside the VA’s current system, and no one should be outraged that they now have a choice,” O’Rourke told a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee at a hearing in March.

Until 2006, there were criminal penalties for companies that took fees from veterans for filing disability claims. That year, however, the penalties disappeared in an update to federal law. 

“We don’t have a clear answer why it was taken away,” said Rep. Chris Pappas, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who has introduced legislation to restore those criminal penalties.

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Right now, if the VA finds out an unaccredited company is charging veterans for the preparation of their benefits claims, the department can send a cease and desist letter, like the one sent to Veterans Guardian in 2019. If that letter goes unanswered, the department can only report the matter to a state or federal agency, such as an attorney general, and hope it gains more traction. 

The War Horse tried repeatedly to reach the Department of Veterans Affairs through phone calls and email, but the agency would not provide a comment for this story. The agency’s top watchdog was among more than a dozen inspectors general fired by President Trump during his first week back in office in a highly unusual purge. But before Trump’s return, then-VA Inspector General Michael J. Missal told The War Horse in an email that his office was aware of the issue, and “it is not appropriate for any unaccredited ‘claims consultants’ or other representatives to charge veterans a percentage of future payments or fees to assist with filing initial benefit claims.” 

Taylor is careful when he describes how, in his view, Veterans Guardian complies with the law.

“What the current statute says is that you can’t assist a veteran as an agent or attorney without being accredited by the VA,” he said. They’re not attorneys, Taylor said, and “agent” has a dictionary definition that Veterans Guardian doesn’t fit. 

“The purpose of the company is to provide veterans with the best represent—” Taylor stopped himself midsentence. “Actually, I need to rephrase that,” he said. “Not representation, because we do not represent them, but with the best consulting advice to help them navigate the process.”

The company has its fans and boasts a 4.8-star rating with over 2,000 reviews on Google. “They help us get what we have earned!” one recent review states. “Nothing more, and absolutely nothing less!”

Veterans Guardian points to its positive reviews online. Google

But several veterans were so unhappy with Veterans Guardian that they filed a lawsuit that alleges the company “routinely violates federal regulations” in a scheme that “has harmed and continues to harm veterans and their dependents.”

Eric Beard is one of those veterans. The former Army intelligence analyst gave the company access to his military and medical records, according to the lawsuit, and Veterans Guardian took care of the rest. It coordinated a private medical examination to assess his PTSD. It drafted and prepared all the necessary official VA forms and mailed him a packet. All he had to do, according to the lawsuit, was sign and date on the marked lines and put the prestamped, pre-addressed envelope in the mail. 

When the VA required Beard to do an additional medical examination, Veterans Guardian coached him on how to present his symptoms to a VA medical examiner.

Eventually, Beard heard back from the VA: He got a 100 percent disability rating and was suddenly eligible for payments of about $4,200 per month. It also meant that Veterans Guardian came to collect its fee—to the tune of more than $21,000. The lawsuit said Beard never would have entered into an agreement with the company if he knew it was against the law to charge vets for such services. 

“There’s no gray zone whatsoever,” said Wesley McCauley, a Georgia-based VA accredited claims agent. “It’s 100 percent illegal.” 

For his part, Taylor called the lawsuit “baseless claims of wrongdoing” and pointed out that the veterans in the suit “received an increase in their benefits by choosing to hire Veterans Guardian.”

Though Taylor insists that Veterans Guardian doesn’t act as an agent, the company does skirt the line. Sometimes when veterans don’t let them know they got a ratings increase, Taylor said the company will call a hotline managed by the VA and use a veteran’s Social Security number to see if a veteran has gotten a rate increase. The majority of clients, however, just call and let them know, Taylor said. “Most of them are very happy.” 

A House subcommittee wasn’t happy with Taylor in 2022 after his testimony at an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill. When asked if the VA had ever issued Veterans Guardian a cease and desist letter, Taylor testified that it had not. 

But the committee managed to track down the letter that the VA had sent Veterans Guardian in January 2019. Not until lawmakers cited federal law that it was a crime to willfully make a false statement to Congress did Veterans Guardian’s attorney acknowledge the company had received the letter in question.

Showdowns with lawmakers would continue.

On February 2, 2024, Maryland Delegate Nick Allen, an Army veteran who was sent to Afghanistan twice, introduced a new bill in the Maryland General Assembly that would prohibit people from charging a fee or receiving compensation for providing veterans benefits services. Allen said he was motivated to craft the bill, along with Andy Gross, a Maryland VA accredited lawyer, to keep bad actors out of the state. 

“It does seem like a lot of people are probably benefiting from the dysfunction in the VA,” Allen said, “and I think that’s creating kind of a perverse incentive to not fix the dysfunction and not actually help the veterans.” 

Soon after the legislation was proposed, however, Veterans Guardian brought representatives and lobbyists to Maryland to kill the bill. 

“We proposed the bill, they swooped in,” Gross said. “They were getting meetings with the committee chair and pushing hard against the bill.”

A similar story has played out across the country, as states race to use consumer protection laws to fill the gap left by the federal government’s inaction. Stacey Travers saw it in Arizona, when the Army veteran and state representative introduced a bill similar to Maryland’s that same month. 

“We had been sandbagged and sabotaged,” she said. Despite bipartisan support, a hostile amendment was introduced, she said, gutting her bill, which eventually died. 

Not all states mandate that lobbyists make their financial disclosures public. But after searching through lobbyist disclosures in 24 states with relevant legislation, The War Horse found that Veterans Guardian spent more than $420,000 on state lobbying in 2024. 

When the lobbying doesn’t work, Veterans Guardian employs other tactics. Two states, New Jersey and Maine, recently passed laws that make the company’s practices illegal in those states. Almost immediately, the company sued the states’ attorneys general, alleging that its First Amendment rights had been violated. 

These lawsuits could be creating a chilling effect. Allen said that among Maryland lawmakers there may have been some hesitation to pass the bill because they were worried about signing their attorney general, a veteran himself, up for a lawsuit. 

“It’s kind of a nasty way to do business,” said Patrick Murray, past legislative director at VFW. 

Last year, Veterans Guardian spent 2 1/2 times more on federal lobbying compared to what they’ve spent on a state level. 

Their target? The Governing Unaccredited Representatives Defrauding VA Benefits Act, also known as the GUARD Act. Pappas, the New Hampshire Democrat, introduced the bill in 2022. It has strong backing from organizations like the VFW and attorneys general in more than 40 states. 

“We’re putting penalties back in so it’s enforcing the law” that already exists, Murray said.

Veterans Guardian has lobbied strongly against it, testifying against the bill in Congress and spending millions of dollars on lobbyists. According to publicly disclosed lobbying records, the company spent more than $1 million on federal lobbyists in 2024, and more than $2 million in the three years since the GUARD Act was introduced. 

“We can’t fight that kind of money,” said Murray of the VFW, which spent a total of $160,000 to lobby Congress on a variety of issues in 2024, public disclosure records show.  

The fight keeps getting bigger: Veterans Guardian and its allies now have a bill that would benefit them.

In March 2023, Rep. Jack Bergman, a Republican and Marine Corps veteran from Michigan, introduced the Preserving Lawful Utilization of Services for Veterans Act, or the PLUS Act. The bill—co-sponsored at that time by Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican—would cap fees at $12,500 and allow individuals who charge veterans for preparing disability claims, like those who work at Veterans Guardian, to get VA accreditation.

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The company set up its own political action committee, Veterans Guardian VA Claims Consulting PAC, made up of donations from Greenblatt, Taylor, other executives, and their family members. Donations from Veterans Guardian affiliates were in the top five campaign contributions for both Bergman and Mace, according to the campaign finance tracking database OpenSecrets. Bergman received $26,200 from these donors for 2024, and Mace received $19,700. 

The War Horse reached out to Bergman and Mace multiple times through their offices by phone and email and did not receive a reply. 

In a March 2023 legislative hearing in the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, Bergman touted the PLUS Act, name-dropping Veterans Guardian as Taylor sat in front of him. 

“This bill seeks to strike a balance,” he said, by, “improving the accreditation system to allow businesses like Veterans Guardian and others to continue to do their good work.” 

Both the GUARD Act and the PLUS Act have been reintroduced for the 2025 legislative session, though Mace is no longer co-sponsoring the PLUS Act. In fact, the South Carolina Republican grilled Taylor at a House subcommittee hearing in March, peppering him with questions about Veterans Guardian’s revenues and business practices. 

​When Taylor said he wasn’t prepared to answer whether his company made more or less than $100 million a year, Mace shot back: “Of course not.”

Why Mace has gone on the offensive against Veterans Guardian was unclear.  

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But new cosponsors have come forward for the PLUS Act, including three Republicans from Veterans Guardian’s home state: Pat Harrigan, Addison McDowell, and David Rouzer. Veterans Guardian-affiliated individuals donated $10,000 to Rouzer’s campaign for 2024, $26,400 to Harrigan’s campaign, and $42,900 to McDowell, according to OpenSecrets. 

“I fully support the PLUS Act,” McDowell said in an emailed statement to The War Horse, stating that the legislation “will protect veterans from fraud, abuse, and bad actors.” 

Rouzer and Harrigan did not respond to The War Horse’s request for comment. 

Lobbying, Taylor told The War Horse, is an unfortunate necessity for operating a business. The amount of money he and his associates have spent, Taylor said, “That’s hurt. But it’s either do that, or I shut my business down.” 

Taylor said for the last several years, he has not just been focused on trying to defeat the GUARD Act. “I’ve actually been trying to reform accreditation,” he said. 

Taylor suggests that a better solution than banning companies like his that charge fees would be to cap fees and put other guardrails in place to keep bad actors out of the system. “I want oversight,” he said, “but you have to change accreditation to make that possible.” 

When it was pointed out that he could become accredited right now, he would just have to provide his services for free, Taylor acknowledged that was true.

“I could do that for free,” he said, “but I mean, you know, we live in the real world here, and I’m operating this as a business.”

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Leah Rosenbaum is a freelance reporter who covers healthcare. Her reporting and editing have been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, Science News, STAT News, and other publications. She has a master’s in journalism and a master’s of public health from UC Berkeley. She can be reached on her website or on Twitter at @leah_rosenbaum

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