Reviewing Minnesota’s Electronic Conservatorship System

As graduation time is upon us, it’s time to honor those dedicated court professionals who have completed the Institute for Court Management’s Fellows Program. Congratulations! Each graduate must complete a research paper as the final requirement of the program. I am pleased to highlight an exceedingly timely project report on Minnesota’s electronic conservatorship system, written by ICM Fellow Sherilyn Hubert of Minnesota’s Tenth Judicial District, Protecting the Assets of our most Vulnerable in Minnesota, Sherilyn has carried out a very worthwhile research project that will benefit all courts that are considering the automation of the conservatorship reporting process.

In 2011, the Minnesota Judicial Branch implemented a statewide web-based program for conservators to enter their account information online to the courts—the Conservator Account Monitoring Preparation and Electronic Reporting (CAMPER) Program. In FY 2012/13, the program will evolve into CAAP (Conservator Account Auditing Program), which will feature a centralized unit to focus on auditing of accounts. The program, which was first piloted in Ramsey County, was created with the intent to eliminate accounting errors, deter financial exploitation, create workload savings for conservators and court staff, reduce paperwork, improve the identification of overdue and incomplete accountings, provide ready access to expense and receipt details, improve documentation and analysis of conservatorships, and improve the court’s auditing function. The system is used in all 87 counties in 10 judicial districts. It is the first statewide automated conservatorship system in the nation. Since voluntary implementation of the CAMPER program started in July 2010, over 4,000 protected persons have been entered into the database. In August 2011, the total amount of assets of protected persons was almost $400 million.

Sherilyn focused on three objectives for her paper: (1) to determine user satisfaction with the new system; (2) to examine and document past cases of financial loss by conservators; and (3) to research various registration systems relevant to Minnesota’s plans to implement a conservator registration system in 2013. For this blog, I am going to note some of the issues pointed out in regard to financial loss.

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Reviewing Minnesota’s Electronic Conservatorship System