The Fiduciary Program: $2.79 Billion Entrusted, Hundreds Unwatched
Some veterans cannot manage their own money — injury, disease, age. So the VA appoints someone to manage it for them: a fiduciary. In FY2024 that meant $2,786,524,740 of other people's benefits flowing through appointed hands for 101,155 beneficiaries. The program exists because these are the veterans least able to notice being robbed. The inspector general found the VA wasn't watching hundreds of them at all.
The 311 who weren’t in the system
Every fiduciary beneficiary is supposed to have a record in VBMS-Fid, the program's case-management system — the thing that lets staff "prevent misuse of those funds." The OIG found the VA never created records for 311 beneficiaries deemed incompetent, across cases spanning June 2003 to June 2023. Some had fiduciaries "acting without program oversight for more than three years." Some who never got a record received no oversight for potentially as long as 15 years.
The cause was not malice; it was something more typical of this record: the records didn't migrate from a legacy computer system, nobody built a control to notice, and so — for up to a decade and a half — nobody did. The OIG's three recommendations were implemented only after the review.
When someone does allege misuse
Reviewing roughly 1,600 misuse-allegation cases completed between April 2024 and March 2025, the OIG found staff did not always record the earliest allegation date or advance allegations for investigation as required — and that the VBA had no systematic national monitoring of misuse allegations at all. In the OIG's words, without it "the risk of financial abuse will continue undetected."
What unwatched money invites
The case files in this section show what fiduciaries do with unmonitored access: a mother who spent her wheelchair-bound son's benefits on a car he never used; a police sergeant who embezzled eight veterans' accounts; a fiduciary who stole for over two years. And the pipeline continues: in August 2025 a former VA-appointed fiduciary was indicted — charged, not convicted — for allegedly stealing more than $133,000 from an elderly veteran at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center. The full set is in the case files.
Sources: VA OIG, Lapse in Fiduciary Program Oversight Puts Some Vulnerable Beneficiaries at Risk · VA OIG, Review of the Fiduciary Program's Misuse Allegation Process · VBA Annual Benefits Report FY2024 · VA OIG Monthly Highlights, August 2025. Part of the VA Fraud record.