South Carolina County Veterans’ Affairs Officers

The county veterans' affairs officer is the person who signs the certificate the property tax exemption depends on, so how the office is structured matters more in South Carolina than the subject usually does. Section 25-11-40(B) sets the appointment: "Subject to the recommendation of a majority of the Senators representing the county and a majority of the House members representing the county, the secretary shall appoint a county veterans' affairs officer for each county in the State, whose term of office shall begin July first of each odd-numbered year and shall continue for a term of two years and until a successor shall be appointed." Qualifications are set by the county legislative delegation, not by the department: "Qualifications shall be determined by the county legislative delegation upon a majority vote of the Senators representing the county and a majority of the House members representing the county." And the removal power is held three ways at once: the officer "is an at-will employee of the department, subject to removal for cause at any time by the secretary, a majority of the Senators representing the county, and a majority of the House members representing the county." An officer serves a state agency, is qualified by legislators, and can be removed by either of two legislative majorities or by the secretary. That is an unusual accountability structure for a role whose function is to certify facts about individual veterans. 2025 Act No. 43 (H. 3563), signed May 12, 2025, then added Section 25-11-50(B), and it takes the secretary out of that list without touching Section 25-11-40. The secretary or a designee "shall evaluate each county office no more than twice per year to determine the level of service being provided to veterans and to ensure compliance with established uniform methods and procedures"; the department reevaluates any deficiency within six months and may help the county with a corrective action plan; the secretary reports the final inspection in writing to the legislative delegation and the county administrator within ninety days. And the subsection ends: "The secretary or his designee shall not have the authority to remove a county officer for any reason." Section 25-11-40(B) still says the officer is "subject to removal for cause at any time by the secretary". Both are in the current code. The later and more specific enactment is the 2025 one, which is the ordinary tiebreaker, and read that way the power to remove sits with the two legislative majorities while the secretary's remedy for a failing office is an inspection report to them. An officer or a veteran relying on either sentence should expect the question to be argued. Section 25-11-40(C) is the part that protects the veteran. Every county officer "must successfully complete a comprehensive course of training and be issued accreditation within one year following initial appointment, either through the department or through an accredited national veterans' service organization." The training criteria are developed by a training council from the South Carolina Association of County Veterans' Affairs Officers together with the department or an accredited national service organisation. An officer who does not complete the training and receive accreditation within the first year "is ineligible for reappointment by the county legislative delegation." And "in order to maintain accreditation, refresher training is required yearly." An annual refresher requirement written into statute is worth knowing about, because accreditation is what lets the officer represent a claimant before VA at all. 2019 Act No. 26 rewrote the section when the Department of Veterans' Affairs became a cabinet agency, and Section 5 of that act grandfathered the incumbents: county officers serving on or before the effective date of the amended subsection (B) "are not subject to the revised qualifications provided in this section." Section 25-11-45 solves the funding problem that used to leave the office dependent on county goodwill: "Notwithstanding Section 1-30-110(4), a county veterans' affairs office must be funded with monies appropriated by the General Assembly for that purpose and payable directly to the County Treasurer's Office by the State Treasurer." The money is appropriated by the State and paid straight to the county treasurer. Section 25-11-40(D) preserves local arrangements in Dorchester County under Act 512 of 1996, and editor's notes record that Berkeley, Dorchester and Georgetown county councils each took over the appointment power from their legislative delegations in 1996. There is one drafting oddity in the section that no veteran should be turned away on, but which is worth recording. Section 25-11-40(A) says: "For the purpose of this section, 'veteran' means a person who served on active duty in the armed forces of the United States and who was honorably discharged or released from such service due to a service-connected disability." Read literally that defines a veteran, for purposes of the section that creates and staffs the county offices, as someone honorably discharged or medically separated. It is copied from the definition used for the apprenticeship hiring credit in Section 12-6-3720(H)(2) and it does not fit the context it was put into. It governs the section that appoints officers, not the population they serve, and the department serves veterans generally. Section 25-11-50(A) governs the relationship between the secretary and the county officers, and Section 25-11-75 permits the appointment of an additional claims representative. Section 25-11-70 gives the department specific duties in connection with the Agent Orange Information and Assistance Program, including authority to sue for the release of information, which is a remnant of an earlier era but still live law.