2026-10-11
A federal judge just ruled an unaccredited VA claims company illegally charged a veteran $21,360 for a claim the law says should be free
Filing a VA disability claim means handing someone your DD-214, your Social Security number on VA Form 21-526EZ, and private medical records establishing the condition — and a small industry of unaccredited "claims consulting" companies has built itself around collecting exactly that packet, for a fee federal law says should be free. A federal court just ruled, on the record, what one of those companies did with it. Here's what encrypting that packet before you send it actually fixes, and what the ruling itself already tells you to check first.
A federal judge just put a number on one of these fees
In a ruling in the certified class action Ford v. Veterans Guardian VA Claim Consulting (No. 1:23-cv-00756, M.D.N.C.), Chief Judge Catherine Eagles found the company acted as an unaccredited "agent" under federal law while preparing and presenting veterans' disability claims — something only a VA-accredited attorney, claims agent, or Veteran Service Officer may legally do. Per the VFW's own summary of the order, "the evidence is undisputed that Guardian is not accredited... it charges fees for doing so. These actions violate federal law." The court was specific about what made it an agent: Guardian collected veterans' personal information, scheduled their medical appointments, compiled their evidence, prepared pre-addressed envelopes, and tracked delivery of the claim packet to the VA — "these are the acts that make Guardian an 'agent' in this statutory scheme." One named plaintiff, a former Army intelligence analyst, used Guardian to file his first disability claim and was rated 100% disabled, worth $4,272.80 a month; Guardian billed him $21,360 — five times that monthly increase — and he'd paid more than $19,000 of it, with over $2,100 still owed, by the time the case reached this ruling. The VA had already sent the company cease-and-desist letters in 2019 and 2024; it kept operating both times. The complaint itself alleges Guardian collected more than $250 million from veterans across the certified class — an allegation, not a court finding, with damages and a separate state deceptive-trade-practices claim still unresolved as of the ruling.
What the law actually allows, and the VA's own way to check
Guardian isn't unusual in how it's structured, only in how plainly a court has now described it. Under federal law, help with a veteran's initial disability claim has to be free: 38 U.S.C. § 5904(c)(1) bars charging any fee for services provided before a Notice of Disagreement is filed, and even after that point a representative's total fee is capped at 20% of whatever past-due benefits the claim recovers. Guardian's five-times-the-monthly-increase model sat entirely outside that framework, because the company was never VA-accredited to begin with. The VA's own free lookup — the Office of General Counsel's accreditation search — lets anyone check whether a person claiming to be an accredited attorney, claims agent, or Veteran Service Officer representative actually is one, before a single document changes hands.
It isn't one company
A separate NPR investigation, published Dec. 2, 2025, found the same business model running at a second company, Trajector Medical, based on interviews with 11 former employees and about 60 veteran customers. Trajector isn't VA-accredited either, and because the VA won't release a veteran's benefit payment details to an unaccredited company, NPR reported that Trajector runs an automated robo-dialer, "CallBot," which calls the VA's own benefits hotline and enters veterans' Social Security numbers and birthdates to check for a rating increase — the trigger for its bill. One veteran's rating rose from 10% to 80% and the resulting bill was $17,400; other bills have reached $20,000, on the same five-times-the-increase structure as Guardian. The VA has sent Trajector repeated written warnings that its fee practice is likely illegal; as of the investigation, it kept operating, and a bill introduced in Congress in May 2026 targets the robo-dialer practice specifically.
What's actually in the packet
Set the fee dispute aside and look at what moves, because it's identical whether the help is free and accredited or not: your DD-214, which carries your Social Security number and full service record; VA Form 21-526EZ, which asks for your Social Security number directly; and whatever private medical records, treatment notes, or buddy statements establish that a condition is connected to your service. Every VA disability claim needs this packet assembled somewhere before it reaches the VA, and in practice that assembly usually happens by email or a shared cloud folder, between a veteran and whoever is helping — an accredited VSO working for free, an accredited agent or attorney working within the 20% cap, or an unaccredited company doing the identical work for a fee the law doesn't allow.
What encrypting that packet actually fixes
NearSeal runs entirely in your browser — the DD-214, the 21-526EZ, the medical records you're about to send never upload anywhere to get encrypted. They're sealed on your own device with AES-256-GCM and a passphrase-derived key (PBKDF2-SHA256 at 220 iterations) before they go anywhere. That removes the plaintext copy from the two places you actually control: the file sitting in your own Sent mail or Downloads folder, and the attachment crossing the wire into whatever inbox or upload portal is on the other end. For the passphrase to do any good once it arrives, it has to travel a separate channel from the file — a text or a call, not a reply in the same thread.
What that doesn't fix
Encryption protects a file from everyone except whoever holds the passphrase — it says nothing about whether that person is legally entitled to be holding it, or what they do with your Social Security number and medical history once they've opened it. Encrypting your claim packet doesn't make an unaccredited company accredited, cap its fee at the 20% the law allows, or stop it from passing your file along to a robo-dialer, a debt collector, or a corporate entity several layers removed from the one you emailed. That's exactly the gap the Veterans Guardian ruling describes: a company the court found was never entitled to touch this packet for a fee in the first place, instructing veterans to mail in paperwork it had prepared as though they'd done it alone — which is also why checking the VA's own accreditation lookup before you send anything is not a formality. Verify who you're sending to first. Encrypt the packet only once that part is settled.
Two more honest limits
NearSeal's default container keeps the original filename in a plaintext header field — bound into the authenticated data so it can't be silently swapped, but still readable without the passphrase. A file literally named "john_smith_dd214_ssn.pdf" tells anyone who intercepts it exactly what's inside before they've cracked anything; rename it to something unremarkable first, or use the opt-in age-encryption.org format, which carries no filename field at all. And there is no passphrase recovery of any kind — forget it before your VSO or agent has had a chance to open the file, and the encrypted copy is permanently unreadable, including to you.
Where NearSeal fits
A court has now put a number on what one unaccredited company billed a single veteran for a claim the law says should have cost nothing, and a second investigation found the same model running on a second company through a different route into the same packet. No amount of encryption changes whether the person on the other end is accredited, or whether their fee is legal — only the VA's own lookup tool and the 20%-after-a-Notice-of-Disagreement rule do that. What's left once you've checked that is the same ordinary gap NearSeal closes in every other document it's written about: the plaintext copy of your SSN, your DD-214, and your medical records that otherwise sits on your device and crosses an open wire the whole way to wherever that packet is headed.