NEW YORK TIMES: … Lawyers, financial advisers and insurance brokers have formed a lucrative alliance with retirement communities and assisted living facilities to extract many billions of taxpayer dollars from the V.A., according to interviews with state and federal authorities, as well as a review by The New York Times of hundreds of legal documents and client contracts.
Questionable actors are capitalizing on loose oversight to unlock the V.A. money and enrich themselves, sometimes at veterans’ expense. The V.A. accreditation process is so lax that applicants provide their own background information, including any criminal records. But the V.A. has only four full-time employees evaluating the approximately 5,000 applications that it receives annually. Once people get the V.A.’s stamp of approval, they rarely lose it, even if a customer complaints or regulatory actions mount. Last year, the V.A. revoked its accreditation for two of its more than 20,000 advisers…
The development recalls the array of questionable business practices involving seniors and Medicaid. Indeed, many of the firms that zeroed in on those programs in the past have recast themselves as V.A. specialists. More than 200 firms nationwide now focus on V.A. retirement benefits, according to the Government Accountability Office… (more)
