Op-Ed: Tanner Port: North Carolina Made a Promise to Veterans
North Carolina Made a Promise to Veterans. North Carolina’s based Company Veterans Guardians have broken it.
By: Tanner Port, Legislative Chairman for the Department of NC, Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Since President Lincoln, the nation has held to a single charge: to care for those who have borne the battle. In North Carolina, part of keeping that promise has always been simple and free. When a veteran files a disability claim, an accredited service officer, trained and vetted under federal law, helps prepare it at no cost. That is not charity. It is the system Congress built precisely so that no one could stand between a veteran and the benefits they earned and charge a toll to pass.
Section 4 of Senate Bill 118, the Military and Veteran Support Act, signed into law by Governor Stein last July as Session Law 2025-72, quietly weakened that promise. Among its many provisions, the law set rules for the for-profit companies that charge veterans to help file claims. It caps their fee at five times a veteran's first month of increased benefits. To the uninitiated that verbiage that sounds like a "limit."
In practice, it has become a license. For a veteran without dependents who goes from a zero to a one-hundred-percent rating, that "capped" fee can exceed twenty thousand dollars, for a service an accredited officer in the same county would have provided for free.
I want to be honest with this body about how that language became law, because my organization owes you that candor. When these fee provisions first appeared, in Senate Bill 693, the North Carolina Veterans Council formally opposed them. Then the language was lifted out of that bill and folded into Senate Bill 118, an omnibus carrying concealed-carry fee reductions, tuition rules, driver's license renewals, and much else that veterans genuinely needed.
In the closing days of the session the provision moved, and unfortunately, we did not catch it in time. The bill subsequently passed both chambers unanimously and was signed before we caught that the verbiage had been transferred to SB 118.
That is on us, but it is the VFW's job to make sure the legislature is aware of its impact.
Less than 10 months since the bill passed, a federal court highlighted what the VFW's opposition was rooted in, telling us plainly what that provision protects. On May 20 of this year, Chief Judge Catherine Eagles of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled in Ford v. Veterans Guardian that the company, a North Carolina firm, based in Pinehurst, was acting as an unaccredited agent, preparing and presenting veterans' disability claims and charging fees for it, in violation of federal law. The court called the facts undisputed. It noted the fee at issue: five times the veteran's monthly increase. The very structure our statute blessed is the structure a federal judge found unlawful.
This was not a company caught off guard. As far back as January 2019, the Department of Veterans Affairs sent Veterans Guardian a cease-and-desist letter warning that it "is prohibited by law from assisting Veterans in the preparation, presentation, or prosecution of their VA benefits." Despite this, the company kept operating. Three years later, before a House Committee on Veterans' Affairs panel in April 2022, co-founder William Taylor testified that the company had received no such letter. Lawmakers then produced the 2019 letter themselves, and only after they cited the federal law making it a crime to knowingly mislead Congress did the company acknowledge it had received the warning all along.
That exchange is a matter of public congressional record.
This is not a partisan matter, and I do not raise it as one. The Veterans of Foreign Wars has said the same thing at the national level, that a company cannot escape federal accreditation law simply by calling itself a "consultant." A federal court in our own state has now agreed. The question before North Carolina is narrow and practical: our statute currently permits, and lends the dignity of state law to, a fee model that federal law forbids.
There is a clean way to fix this. The VFW of North Carolina asks that the General Assembly pass a straightforward veterans' claims accreditation bill, one that aligns North Carolina with the federal standard that already governs this conduct. Require that anyone who charges a veteran to prepare or present a disability claim be accredited by the VA, as attorneys and service officers already must be. Preserve, in plain language, the free accredited assistance that has always been a veteran's right. Such a bill takes nothing from veterans. It protects the honest options they already have and closes the door our current law left open.
If a clean bill is not achievable in this long session, then at minimum, repeal Section 4. A statute that legitimizes a twenty-thousand-dollar charge for free work is worse than silence. Removing it would at least return the field to the federal law that a court has just affirmed.
Veterans in this state are not a market to be opened. The promise we make when we ask men and women to serve is the back half of the promise we make when we send them into harm's way, and it was never meant to carry a service charge.
