April 18, 2025
Veterans Guardian says it’s fighting to give veterans a choice. Critics say they’re guardians of greed.
It started in 2017 with a group of friends and colleagues—the first 40 clients whom U.S. Army veterans Scott Greenblatt and Bill Taylor signed up to help.
They had come home from combat zones weary and weakened by illness and injury, with a promise of monthly disability payments from the country they served. But first, they had to navigate the lumbering bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Soon, those 40 veterans grew to 275 a month. Then 275 soared to 500. Last year, Taylor and Greenblatt’s company Veterans Guardian assisted about 30,000 veterans with benefits claims, according to Taylor. “We have your back,” the company’s website says. “Together we can uncover all the benefits you deserve.”
The one problem with their success story: Veterans Guardian’s business model runs afoul of the law, say lawmakers and attorneys general from across the country. But nobody has been able to stop them.
With no accreditation, the company is charging veterans thousands of dollars for guidance that veterans service organizations and other nonprofits advise vets on for free.
A whistleblower lawsuit from one of Veterans Guardian’s former employees claims the firm’s business practices are “permeated with fraud and deceit” and cheating the federal government out of millions of dollars. A lawsuit filed by veterans alleges the company “preys on disabled veterans by unfairly and deceptively taking tens of millions of dollars of their disability benefits in violation of federal law.”
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A Former Employee Blows the Whistle
Leslie Carico had been working as a document control specialist at Veterans Guardian for about five months in May 2019 when she began discussing concerns with a coworker. It wasn’t long before “disloyalty” cost her the job, according to a whistleblower lawsuit she filed in 2020.
Her dramatic claims emerged last year when the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina unsealed the case. In a complaint that spans more than 60 pages, she detailed how Veterans Guardian “hijacks the application process, wresting control of it from the veteran” with a “singular focus”: a 100% disability rating for the maximum VA benefit possible so the company can charge the largest commission.
Among the alleged tactics, according to the lawsuit:
- Claims strategists with no medical background interviewed veterans and quickly assessed which health issues should be listed on their forms.
- The company referred veterans to the same psychologist for remote exams— sometimes conducted by the psychologist’s family members—and mental health forms were auto-populated with identical checkmarks.
- Employees changed scores on depression self-evaluations if they felt the score was too low, sometimes without the veterans’ knowledge.Â
- Applicants were coached to look “tired and shabby” for appointments with VA medical examiners. They were advised not to shave, told to use a cane or wheelchair if they had one, and to use buzz words such as “depressed,” “sad,” and “no motivation.”
- Veterans Guardian employees routinely tacked on secondary conditions like erectile dysfunction and headaches to a veteran’s diagnosis if resubmitting an application was necessary.
- Employees were instructed to tell prospective customers that VA “could not be trusted to deal with veterans fairly. Misrepresentations may have to be made.”
The reason that the company went to these lengths, Carico’s lawsuit said, was simple: money. The company charged a one-time fee of five times the amount of a veteran’s monthly disability benefit increase. For a veteran going from a 0 to 100% rating, this could amount to up to $4,500 a month—a payout of more than $22,000 for Veterans Guardian. The company charged nothing to a veteran who received no benefit rating increase—but this was rare. In interviews with The War Horse, three former employees said the company “cherry-picked” who to help, turning away veterans who did not have a strong case.
Carico’s lawyers did not make her available for an interview with The War Horse. But two current and four former Veterans Guardian employees said in interviews they had seen many of Carico’s claims firsthand.
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In an emailed statement to The War Horse, Carico’s lawyers called the allegation baseless, “designed to discredit a whistleblower revealing serious fraud,” and “a familiar tactic used against women who speak truth to power.”
Read This Company Is Spending Millions to Profit Off Veterans’ Benefits. Why Won’t Lawmakers Stop It?.