Massachusetts Ban on Charging for VA Claims Help

This provision exists because of an industry. Companies that are not accredited by VA have for several years charged veterans a share of their retroactive award, or a multiple of their monthly increase, for help filing disability claims that an accredited representative or a municipal veterans' agent would do for nothing. Section 47 of the 2024 HERO Act inserted a section 18 into chapter 115 to make it unlawful in Massachusetts. The scope is defined broadly. A veterans benefits matter means the preparation, presentation or prosecution of any claim affecting any person who has filed or expressed an intent to file a claim for any benefit, programme, service, commodity, function or status whose entitlement is determined under the laws and regulations administered by VA or the Department of Defense, pertaining to veterans, their dependents, their survivors and any other individual eligible for such benefits. Person is defined to include every kind of entity, and compensation means payment of any money, thing of value or financial benefit. Three things are then prohibited in regard to a veterans benefits matter. Receiving compensation for preparing, presenting, prosecuting, advising, consulting or assisting any individual with any veterans benefits matter, except as permitted under federal law. The exception is the whole of the lawful space: federal law lets an accredited attorney or agent charge a fee for representation in a case where a notice of disagreement or its modern equivalent has been filed, within limits, and lets nobody charge for preparing an initial claim. Receiving compensation for referring a veteran to another person to do any of those things. This closes the obvious workaround, where an unaccredited firm collects a finder's fee rather than a service fee. Guaranteeing, directly or by implication, that any individual is certain to receive specific veterans benefits, or a specific level, percentage or amount of benefits. This one is about advertising as much as about contracts, and "by implication" is doing the work. Receiving excessive or unreasonable fees under 38 C.F.R. 14.636(e) as compensation for advising or assisting a veteran with any veterans benefits matter is separately prohibited. That federal regulation is the fee-reasonableness rule, and pulling it into state law gives a Massachusetts enforcement route against a fee that is nominally lawful in structure but too large. Then the remedy, in subsection (c), in one sentence: a violation of this section shall also be a violation of chapter 93A. Chapter 93A is the Massachusetts consumer protection statute, and that is a significant thing to attach. It means a veteran can send a statutory demand letter, sue, and recover actual damages or a statutory minimum, with the possibility of double or treble damages for a wilful or knowing violation, and attorney's fees and costs on success. The Attorney General can act as well. A veteran who has already paid a contingency fee to an unaccredited claims company has a route to get it back that does not depend on anyone else deciding to prosecute. What a veteran should do instead. The free and lawful routes are a municipal veterans' agent under G.L. c. 115, s. 3, who must be certified and retrained under section 3B and is bound by the confidentiality rule in section 3B(f); a state service officer; or a VA-accredited representative of a veterans service organisation. None of them charges anything for preparing a claim. One numbering problem that will trip up anyone citing this. The 2024 legislative session produced three different provisions numbered section 18 of chapter 115: the women veterans' network, inserted by section 115 of chapter 140 of the Acts of 2024; this fee ban, inserted by section 47 of chapter 178; and a burn pit registry and database provision, inserted by section 139 of the same chapter 178. The official General Laws website prints all three under the heading "Section 18" with editorial notes explaining which act inserted which. When writing to an agency about this provision, describe it as the veterans benefits matter compensation section rather than as chapter 115 section 18.