New state actions, announced Oct. 31, aim to increase veteran’s access to employment in Massachusetts.
In a press conference at the State House, leadership from the state Executive Offices of Veterans Services and Workforce Development announced a new tax credit to encourage businesses to hire veterans and a data dashboard to track employment trends.
Improving support for veterans seeking employment and education opportunities has been a priority since he entered the role last year, said Jon Santiago, secretary of Veterans Affairs.
“When [veterans] transition back from their military careers to that in the civilian sector, the importance of getting footing in the education and employment sectors are typically the first and second thing that come to their minds, and we have to do more for them,” he said during remarks at the launch.
The new initiatives could be useful steps to create more connections to employment for veterans who often face challenges around employment from cultural differences of life in the military compared to civilian life, or the lingering mental and physical health impacts of service, said Kathyrn King, program director at Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center’s Veteran Outreach Center, in an interview.
“It’s not that they can’t do the job, it’s more of a mind-shift of no longer being in the service,” King said. “They have to learn how to adapt to civilian life and sometimes it’s challenging.”
King said she hopes that the $2,500 tax credit, officially called the Veteran Hire Tax Credit, will help make the prospect of hiring veterans more appealing to employers.
“Once something like that is put on the table, the effort increases for companies and organizations to look for veterans specifically,” King said.
That focus is a goal of the state in launching the credit, said Lauren Jones, secretary of Labor and Workforce Development.
“We know sometimes an incentive can be a resource, but it also brings employers more to the table, opening their doors and creating the exact pathways that we are looking to lift up,” Jones said in her remarks.
And leadership from the state said they hope the new data dashboard will be able to better guide future work around veteran employment.
Access to clear data in one place will help make efforts grounded in fact rather than assumptions, said Matt Sutton, a veterans employment representative at MassHire, the state’s workforce program that connects prospective employees with career coaching and employment opportunities. Veterans get priority service through the MassHire system.
“Many of our assumptions about veterans are either inaccurate or passe, and this is why we need data,” Sutton said at the launch. “We need innovative data tools such as the veteran’s equity dashboard, not to drive but rather to inform what we do.”
That dashboard, which launched Oct. 31, is the latest in a series of equity dashboard by the state’s Department of Economic Research.
According to the new dashboard, as of 2022, there were 240,000 veterans in the state. Of that group, about 102,000 were between 18 and 65 years old — what is considered “typical working age.”
Under the new tax credit, small businesses with fewer than 100 employees are eligible for a $2,500 tax credit when they hire veterans. They must have also been eligible for and have claimed the federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit.
In an effort to direct the credit to businesses that not only hire, but retain veterans on staff, those businesses must also be certified as Veteran Ready Businesses, an accreditation under a state program that works to educate about the value of hiring veterans and their spouses.
“Through this VRB program, we’re looking to continue to educate employers, foster a culture of veteran support and strengthen the network of veteran-friendly businesses here in the Commonwealth,” said Tom LaRose, director of the state’s Veterans Employment, Education, and Training program, at the event.
That step is important to help veterans be supported in the roles they land, said King, who called the requirement of accreditation under the Veteran Ready Businesses program “100% needed” to make it effective.
“If you go to a foreign country, say you go to Spain or Italy, you don’t know the language, so someone is going to have to teach the language. You don’t know how to drive on the other side of the road,” King said. “You need someone that’s going to understand your culture, whether that’s the culture of where you grew up, or in the sense of the culture of the military, because it is its own culture. It has its own language. It has its own way of doing things.”
Throughout the development of these initiatives, leadership from the two executive offices said that collaboration has been key to making work like this possible, as well as other steps to support veteran employment that the state has taken in the past year-and-a-half since the Office of Veterans Services was elevated to a secretariat.
“From the very beginning, we knew that veterans’ needs would require cross agency efforts, really open lines of communication, that transformation simply wouldn’t be possible without collaboration,” Santiago said.
That need for collaboration also extends to partner organizations across the state, Jones said.
“In order to deliver on workforce development, it takes collaboration with so many different community partners, many that are represented here, and so many that are across all 351 cities and towns, as we think about resources for our veterans,” Jones said.
Santiago also tied the latest efforts to ongoing work Massachusetts has been doing to attempt to transform veteran’s services in the state. His office was elevated to a secretariat-level position in March 2023.
In March, 2024, the state announced a $20 million campaign with the aim of ending veteran homelessness in the state. That effort included the largest targeted investment to address the issue in the state’s history. That effort was launched as a partnership with the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
And this summer, the state legislature passed the Act Honoring, Empowering, and Recognizing Our Servicemembers and Veterans — or HERO Act — which included provisions around behavioral support and disability support for veterans, protecting and expanding tax exemptions and codifying medical assistance benefits.
The $2,500 Veteran Hire Tax Credit was also included in the legislation, which was signed by Gov. Maura Healey in August.
Steps like that, as well as the new efforts announced by the state last week, are helping usher in a new era of veterans’ services in Massachusetts, Santiago said.
“Not only are we investing more in veteran services than ever before, but we’re engaging more veterans than ever, and the outcomes are tangible and they’re very real,” he said.
