Always on
Veterans and surviving spouses
This layer runs for everybody, whether or not anyone mentions military service. That is deliberate, and it is the single design decision on this site most likely to put money in a household's hands.
Why we do not ask first
If you ask "did anyone in the household serve" before showing anything, a family that does not think of itself as a veteran family answers no and never sees the layer. Those are exactly the people who miss this.
The clearest case is a surviving spouse. A widow in her eighties whose husband served for two years in the 1950s, sixty years ago, usually does not describe herself as connected to the VA. She may still be entitled to a pension, and to help with the cost of care at home.
So the layer is shown to everyone, framed conditionally, and asserts nothing about the household. If the check is told about service, the layer moves to the top instead of appearing further down.
County Veterans Service Offices
A County Veterans Service Office files claims for veterans, surviving spouses and dependants at no charge. They are accredited, they are county staff, and they are free. You do not need us to introduce you.
We hold 57 of them, read from the official CalVet locator and dated. One California county has no office of its own, and we record that as a checked finding rather than showing an empty space or inventing an address for it.
What we are careful about
Veterans benefits are the area where confident guessing does the most damage, because the rules turn on dates of service, discharge characterisation, income, assets and care costs all at once. We screen. We do not adjudicate, and we never tell anyone they will receive anything.
Where a rule depends on a fact we do not hold, the answer is "possible" and the missing fact is named, so the conversation with the service officer starts further along.