Guam Derived Veterans Benefits for a Spouse, Surviving Spouse or Legal Guardian

Article 1B of Chapter 4, Title 4, added by Public Law 31-240 on December 6, 2012, is unusual enough to deserve its own entry: Guam takes three benefits that belong to the veteran and hands them, as "derived benefits," to the spouse, legal guardian or surviving spouse. The three are named in § 4B101(a). The waiver of the driver's license fee at 16 GCA § 3102.1, which is available to all veterans. The waiver of the annual vehicle license and registration fee at 16 GCA § 7160(e) and § 7161(f) and 10 GCA § 51506(d), which for the veteran requires a one hundred percent rating or individual unemployability. And the preferences at 4 GCA § 4104 for veterans with a one hundred percent disability or individual unemployability. Subsection (b) says expressly that the ten-point preference under § 4104 shall be applicable as a derived benefit. That last one is the striking part. A spouse or surviving spouse of a qualifying veteran gets ten points added to a competitive examination score for a government of Guam job in their own right. Who counts is defined at 10 GCA § 67101, and the definitions are narrower than they look. A spouse is a person legally married to the veteran at the time that veteran was on active duty, active duty for training or inactive duty training and before the date the service-connected injuries occurred, and who is subsequently rated by VA at one hundred percent disabled or individually unemployable. A surviving spouse is a person who was married to a service member who died from service-connected injuries while on active duty and has not remarried, or who was married for at least one year immediately before the death of a veteran rated one hundred percent or individually unemployable and has not remarried. A legal guardian covers both the guardian of minor children of a deployed single parent, designated before the deployment, and the guardian of a disabled service member who is divorced, never married, widowed or without children. The eligibility periods are hard dates. A spouse's benefits continue as long as the marriage does, and end on the date of an adjudicated final divorce decree. A surviving spouse's benefits continue for ten years from the date of death of the service member, which is a real cliff and is worth diarising. A legal guardian's benefits continue until the minor children reach eighteen, or twenty-three if enrolled full-time in an accredited degree or certification programme, or until the service member dies. There is an era limit at § 4B106. Derived benefits apply to the eligible family of veterans who served during World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War and conflicts associated with the War on Terror. A family member of a veteran whose service falls outside those windows is outside the article. Gold Star parents are treated alongside this scheme elsewhere in the code: for the driver license and registration fee waivers they are eligible under 16 GCA § 7120.3(b) and their eligibility period is the same as a surviving spouse's. The Guam Office of Veterans Affairs certifies eligibility, and the Department of Revenue and Taxation, the Department of Administration and the human resource divisions of autonomous agencies extend the benefits to those certified.