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Texas Disabled Veterans Fleeced by VA-Appointed Money Managers

Posted byHoumanitarian

(Lise Olsen & Lindsay Wise, Houston Chronicle)
Already a convicted petty thief, Mildred Fedd had pressing bills to pay: parking tickets, a faulty sewage system, house payments and the impound lot holding her truck hostage. So she turned to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs and promised – for a small fee – to watch over an 82-year-old disabled veteran.

With his $5,000, she agreed to buy him a burial plot. Instead, the Houston caregiver paid her own bills – and got caught only after she had spent all his money and went back for more, Harris County records show.

The Veterans Affairs’ Inspector General has repeatedly warned about a plague of fraud and theft in a national program that appoints family members and VA-approved fiduciaries to protect a whopping $3 billion in assets belonging to veterans the government considers too disabled to manage their own money.

In the past decade, twice as many Texans have been prosecuted for stealing from disabled veterans enrolled in the VA fiduciary program as in any other state, records obtained by the Houston Chronicle show. More than 20 veterans’ family members and trusted members of the community – including a former police officer, a federal employee and optometrist – have been convicted and others, including two attorneys, face pending charges of stealing from disabled veterans whose assets they’d been assigned to protect, according to court records from across the state.

Waco optometrist David Fram took $126,250 from a veteran to help prop up his own private business, thefts meticulously documented in financial records later used against him, federal court records show. Charles D. Stange Jr., a former Bexar County sheriff’s jailer and ex-military policeman, went to prison himself for stealing $272,000 he’d supposedly been safeguarding for his own disabled veteran dad.
(To read more see the Houston Chronicle)

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