Montana County Veterans’ Service Offices and Claims Help

The Montana Veteran Affairs Division, established in 1919 and administratively attached to the Department of Military Affairs, runs a statewide network of nine veteran service offices. Their service officers help a veteran, a surviving spouse or a dependent prepare and file claims with the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, and there is no charge. Section 10-2-115 sets the county layer. A county may provide for a county veterans' service office to assist veterans and their families in filing benefit claims, and two or more counties may sign a memorandum of understanding to run a multicounty office on the same terms. The word is "may". No Montana county is required to have a service office, and in a state this size the practical consequence is distance: which office is nearest is a real question, and the state network exists partly because the county layer is optional. Subsection (3) is the quality control provision and it is the one a veteran should care about. Service officers assigned to county offices must be trained, accredited and supervised in accordance with the applicable parts of 38 CFR 14.629, which is the federal accreditation rule for representatives. Accreditation is what lets someone act on a VA claim at all, and federal law bars charging a fee for preparing an initial claim. A person offering to prepare a Montana veteran's initial VA claim for a fee, or for a share of retroactive benefits, is not operating under this section. Section 10-2-115(4) lets a county fund its office under 15-10-425 or by other means, which is why the presence and staffing of an office varies by county budget rather than by veteran population. Two funding sources sit behind the state division and are worth knowing about because they are unusual. Section 10-2-108 creates a veterans and surviving spouses account fed by revenue deposited under 16-12-111 and 16-11-119, which are the marijuana tax and tobacco settlement provisions; Montana pays for a share of its veterans services out of cannabis tax revenue. And section 10-2-112 creates a veterans' services account fed by the surcharge on patriotic licence plates under 10-2-114, which is $15 on each original set and each renewal. One service the division provides that is easy to miss. Section 10-2-1306 requires the Veterans' Affairs Division to release, on request, a military discharge document dated 62 years or more before the request that is a public record under the federal Privacy Act, on a form prescribed by the Board, with any social security number redacted. For a family researching a grandparent's World War II or Korea service that is a faster route than the National Personnel Records Center.