We need people to inspire us onward in a flawed world; we need people to blame for the flaws.
But our desire for clarity can create polarity. Our search for simplicity can miss the point.
The Record-Eagle’s nine-month dive into Michigan’s guardianship and conservator system found few heroes or villains, and fewer simple answers.
The more reporters investigated, the more tangles they found.
Many working in the system had both insight into its flaws and also reasons for them — changed policies, realities of funding and staffing, jurisdiction issues, delineation of duties, client privacy, fragmentation and more.
Those in the system juggle these, with the responsibility to decide what’s best for someone else, while walking a tightrope between ardent family members who disagree with each other on what “best” is. The difficulties are no doubt immense.
But we let one faction guide our reporting: The people for whom the system is built.
Vulnerable adults. The elderly. Those incapacitated by circumstance and illness. The guardian/conservator system is meant to serve them — not those orbiting around them.
But time, and time again, we found the system serving itself, the absence of the voices of the individuals in question creating both a vacuum and an opportunity for exploitation; a lack of accountability and transparency allowing repeated and unnecessary incompetence and abuse.
“Unguarded’s” findings bear repeating:
- Probate courts aren’t built to audit and monitor what guardians do with their wards.
- Protocol changes by the state judiciary, made in the name of reform, weakened state oversight.
- Three employees in the Attorney General’s office are tasked with keeping a watchful eye on more than 1,600 vulnerable individuals who have no family members interested in their well-being.
- Reform efforts have come and gone with little to show, the result of repeated efforts by judges and professional guardians to resist oversight changes. Those efforts are being revived today.
- “Good” guardians are sorely needed, but the job often pays pennies and encourages professional guardians to oversee as many wards as possible.
Progress is possible, and long overdue.
Attorney General Dana Nessel’s Elder Abuse Task Force — a body of 100 officials, lawyers, elder advocates and politicians — put forward several fixes to improve life for the state’s elderly.
Of nine, two have been realized — banks must now report suspected fraud of vulnerable adults and there’s a new form for law enforcement to use when reporting that fraud.
The other seven stalled in the House, “revised” by special interest-influence to dilute caps on the number of wards a guardian can be appointed to serve, remove requirements for guardians to personally visit their wards and debate certifications for guardians and conservators, including requirements for minimum training and professional standards.
Lobby groups for those in the system, like for judges and guardians, opposed the initial recommendations.
This isn’t the end of the story, as all of us will be needed to fix what is broken.
We will continue our reporting on every side of this complicated problem.
But the answers can be simple if we let one principle guide us — who does the system serve and how does it serve them?
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