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| Tiffany Moore Russell |
An audit by the office of Orange County Comptroller Phil Diamond suggests Orange County Clerk of Courts Tiffany Moore Russell has not adequately monitored the guardian program.
On four of those recommendations, Russell did “not concur” and it is currently unknown if those changes will be made.
Under Florida’s guardian system, professional or public guardians, or in many cases, family members or friends, are appointed by a judge to oversee the financial and health care affairs of a person, called a “ward,” deemed to be physically or mentally incapacitated, or both.
The audit covers 3,302 guardian cases from 2007 through 2017, with each case representing a ward. In just 14 of those cases, the audit revealed $1.25 million in “unsupported expenses” meaning the guardians provided no documentation to substantiate the expenditure of funds from their ward’s accounts. The audit found that $809,000 was allegedly for living facilities for the wards, $81,924 for medical expenses, and $370,426 for “other” expenses.
In general, the audit found: a lack of training by deputy clerks to handle guardian cases, active guardian cases cannot be identified in the case management system, inaccurate data recorded in the case management system, courts not being consistently notified when professional guardians were not following state law, non-professional guardians being appointed, without meeting training requirements under state law, and the clerk did not notify the court in a timely fashion of delinquent guardian case filings.
For example, in 29 cases examined in the audit, filings were delinquent by at least one year, and eight were more than eight years past due. The audit further revealed that a former guardian, suspended by the State Office of Public and Professional Guardians (OPPG- under the direction of the Florida Department of Elder Affairs) still had five active cases.
The audit also found no procedures to document identified conflicts of interest, that could result in guardians taking advantage of their power over a ward’s finances.
For example, one guardian used the services of her husband’s nonprofit business, which handles pooled trusts. He managed and invested the savings accounts of multiple wards. That relationship was not reported to the court, according to the audit. Another guardian had nine cases that generated fees totaling more than $59,000, but those fees were not reported to the court.
Comptroller Diamond concluded, “Based on the results of our testing, the Orange County Clerk Of Courts needs to improve controls over the administration of the guardianship program.”
The audit findings were presented to Russell for a response on Dec. 19, 2019. She provided her response to Diamond’s staff on Jan. 20, 2021, 13 months later.
The response from Russell includes a mention that during the timeframe of the audit, there were two different operations managers in her office, three different circuit judges handling guardian cases and changes in state law in recent years may have contributed to delays in the clerk’s office responding to guardian cases.
Russell added, “While we fully understand the recommendations suggest additional steps in the furtherance of improving communications, some of the findings imply that the clerk is not in compliance (with State law). We find that we are complying with our statutory responsibilities. Without the benefit of a full audit review of all the case numbers corresponding to the findings, we cannot effectively evaluate whether we concur with some findings.”
In Russell’s response, she does not “concur” with four of Diamond’s recommendations, including one to document and implement procedures for reviewing professional guardian cases annually to verify that required documents are accurate, and filed in a timely fashion. She also does not concur with his recommendation that the clerk should develop and implement guardianship and incapacity procedures to document identified conflicts of interest, and should immediately report those conflicts to the court.
Part of the audit focused on the actions, and the clerk’s oversight of 554 cases handled by 11 professional guardians. More than half, 280, were handled by Rebecca Fierle, who was arrested in February 2020 and charged with two felony counts of aggravated abuse and neglect of an elderly or disabled adult.
As previously reported in a series of WESH 2 News investigative reports, Fierle is alleged to have signed more than 140 “Do Not Resuscitate” orders, or DNR’s, for many of her wards. In the case for which she is charged, Steven Stryker, of Central Florida, was hospitalized in Tampa. Fierle signed a DNR, which neither he nor his daughter wanted. Hospital staff reported Fierle declined to rescind the DNR in May 2019 and, days later when Stryker stopped breathing, staff had no legal ability to try and resuscitate him, and he died.
The audit found that in 275 of Fierle’s cases, the attorney representing Fierle is the son-in-law of an examining committee member. Those committee’s determine if people are incapacitated and those recommendations are used to help guide judges in assigning a ward’s legal rights to a guardian.
The audit also found that Fierle was paid $53,988 from a ward’s trust account and it was not reported to the court. Previously, a WESH 2 News investigation revealed Fierle was paid nearly $4 million by AdventHealth over the span of a decade before she was permanently suspended by the state from guardianship in 2019, for services to hundreds of elderly patients, for services not revealed to the court. A previously released Orange County audit also determined Fierle billed the hospital $130 per hour for those patients, and further billed the patients $65 for the same work, none of which was reported to the court.
Fierle is to be tried on the charges in Hillsborough circuit court. She remains free on bond. All of her prior cases have been re-assigned to other professional guardians.
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