'Appalling findings': Audit of Florida's guardianship watchdog agency exposes guardianship failures

OPPG received 174 complaints against professional guardians in two years but rarely took action

An audit of the Office of Public and Professional Guardians shows systematic failures, including failure to develop and implement monitoring tools to make sure guardians comply with the law.

By: Adam Walser

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Auditor has released a scathing report involving the Office of Public and Professional Guardians or OPPG.

Under guardianship, a judge takes away a person’s rights and appoints someone to manage their finances and other aspects of their lives.

State lawmakers created OPPG to police guardians and protect wards under their care, like Willi Berchau, whose story prompted the creation of the watchdog agency in 2015.

Since OPPG opened, millions of tax dollars have been spent on funding the agency, even though auditors say it is failing some of Florida’s most vulnerable seniors.

“They can do whatever they want with you”

The I-Team's investigation into Florida's broken guardianship system started in 2013.

“My court-appointed guardian doesn’t allow me to leave the premises,” Willi Berchau told us when we secretly interviewed him at a church.

The 99-year-old German immigrant had been placed by his court-appointed guardian in a locked-down dementia unit where he didn’t belong.

“You see nobody. You have no contact with anybody,” Berchau said. “If you stayed there any longer, you would mentally go down. Mentally.”

Three months after our first story, a judge restored Berchau’s rights.

“The trouble is, if you have nobody behind your back, they can do whatever they want with you,” Berchau's said at a pizza party his friends threw for him on the day he was released.

In 2015, Florida lawmakers created the Office of Public and Professional Guardians, or OPPG, to protect people in guardianship from isolation, exploitation and abuse.

Former Florida Senator Jeff Brandes was one of the sponsors of the law.

“Willi’s story is what prompted it. We heard the story, and it was so compelling, and we knew that we needed to do something,” Brandes said at the time.

But a recent audit shows OPPG is failing those it is supposed to protect.

Professional guardians received 174 complaints in two years

“This is actually a follow-up audit we did. And to be honest, in some respects, it was worse the second time around,” Deputy Auditor Matthew Tracy told a State Senate committee last month, sharing results from a 33-page audit report.

The audit shows the state’s 566 professional guardians received 174 complaints.

It said OPPG “had not developed and implemented an effective monitoring tool” to make sure guardians complied with state law.

“The extent of the department's oversight of this was a self-asked questionnaire that asked basically did you comply with our requirements and how many wards did you monitor? Basically it was like grading your own test in school,” Tracy said.

The report also said OPPG didn’t promptly address serious complaints.

“People are being kept from their families. They take their money. They sell the house from underneath them,” Tracy testified.

The I-Team previously reported how OPPG often took years to investigate complaints.

“They go to a black hole,” Black said.

Gov. DeSantis acknowledged problems in 2019

Our reporting got Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attention in 2019.

“What troubled me about some of the issues you guys raised was obviously bad things are happening but there doesn’t seem to be anyone held accountable,” he said.

At that time, the I-Team reported OPPG had 132 open investigations.

“I think that over 130 cases and nothing has happened to anybody, that just doesn’t strike me as being acceptable,” DeSantis said.

The entire OPPG administrative staff resigned, but a year later, little had changed.

In 2020, the I-Team obtained internal documents showing a huge backlog of cases, many dating back to before the resignations.

“Every month I’m calling"

Among the cases ... complaints from Terri Kennedy about her Aunt Lille White’s guardianship.

“I never thought anything like this could have happened,” White said in a cell phone video Kennedy recorded the last time she saw her aunt.

Lillie was isolated from family after a dispute over who would inherit her fortune.

“Every month I’m calling and saying another year, another week, another month. Where’s the report?” Kennedy said.

Three years after filing a complaint, OPPG finally sent Kennedy a letter saying her allegations were substantiated, finding her Aunt Lillie’s guardian wasn’t registered and improperly billed her.

But OPPG didn’t discipline the guardian and closed the case.

“I was so angry when I got the OPPG letter,” Kennedy said.

Lillie died the next year.

“She died alone without her family knowing, and two weeks later we find out,” Kennedy said.

We uncovered that OPPG found that at least 8 other guardians broke the law but were allowed to continue serving as guardians.

“They got maybe a requirement to take a couple of continuing education classes, but you can keep the money that mysteriously disappeared,” Black said, describing how OPPG handled cases of guardians who were found to violate the Florida Guardianship statute.

Lawmakers at the hearing where the audit was presented were shocked by the auditors’ recent findings.

“The things that we're hearing in this committee are really appalling,” said Sen. Tom Wright (R-Port Orange).

“Accountability is something we owe our population,” Sen. Jay Collins (R-Tampa) said.

Advocates say unless OPPG begins to hold guardians accountable, more people like Willi Berchau will be isolated, exploited and abused.

“These are our most vulnerable members of our population. And they have almost no protections when they are in the adult guardianship system in the state of Florida,” Black said.

“I think it should be shut down and something else put in place,” Hogue said.

The Department of Elder Affairs Secretary didn’t agree to an interview

We requested an on-camera interview with the Florida Department of Elder Affairs Secretary Michelle Branham.

Her agency oversees OPPG.

We sent multiple emails and a list of topics we wanted to ask her about, but she didn’t agree to an interview.

Branham has an open invitation to sit down with us and discuss the ongoing and recurring problems at OPPG.

The previous OPPG director resigned before the audit was released.

He was the agency’s third director since it opened.

You can find out more about Florida’s broken guardianship system by checking out our years’ long series “The Price of Protection.”

Full Article & Source:
'Appalling findings': Audit of Florida's guardianship watchdog agency exposes guardianship failures

Florida’s elderly guardians operate with little oversight, ‘shocking’ state audit finds

By Carol Marbin Miller

Oversight performed by the state agency created to police Florida’s long-troubled professional guardians is so poor that one of the state’s top auditors likened it to allowing students to grade themselves. 

A stinging report from Florida auditors concluded last month that the Department of Elder Affairs’ Office of Public and Professional Guardians had virtually no method for overseeing the 566 professional guardians registered with the state between July 2022 and January 2024, the audit’s time frame. The OPPG, as it is called, also failed to meet internal timelines for initiating investigations into complaints about guardians.

The findings, part of a report released last month, echo the conclusions of a similar audit conducted four years earlier, also by the state Auditor General. In comments before a joint committee of senators and representatives in the Legislature last week, Deputy Auditor General Matthew Tracy said of the report: “To be honest, in some respects it was worse the second time around.” 

Perhaps the most damning finding: The OPPG does no meaningful routine oversight. Instead, oversight “consisted only of a self-monitoring questionnaire that private professional guardians had the option to complete upon registration renewal.” The questionnaire asked, among a few other things: “basic identifying information” of the guardian, number of open guardianship cases, number of employees and number of wards. 

The form also required that guardians swear that they “perform the function of a professional guardian with reasonable skill,” and that the information they provided was truthful. 

“Basically, it was like grading their own tests in the schools,” Tracy said in his remarks Feb. 18.

The agency’s lapses, Tracy said, amounted to “thwarting the intent of state law and the public’s ability to assess the fitness of a guardian.” 

Anyone can file a petition in probate court in Florida seeking to declare an adult incompetent to handle their own affairs, though, typically, such petitions are submitted by family members worried their elderly relatives can no longer care for themselves. If a panel of three medical or psychological experts agree, an adult can be placed in a guardianship and stripped of many, if not all, of their rights, including the right to vote, marry, write checks, or decide where to live. 

Wards of the state typically are placed in guardianships with close relatives. But if no family members live in the state, or if there is conflict among them, or with the ward, judges can appoint professional guardians to oversee the ward’s interests.

The audit listed the kinds of misdeeds alleged in recent complaints: Stealing the property of wards of the state, and mishandling their funds. Opening fraudulent bank and credit card accounts in the names of wards, and “colluding with attorneys to profit off ward assets.” Phonying up legal and medical records. Acting against the wishes of wards. 

The report also cited complaints regarding guardians “not providing critical daily needs, removing a ward from their home against their wishes and without court approval, and isolating wards from family and friends.” 

State Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman, a Boca Raton Republican who sits on the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee and heard Tracy’s remarks, said the audit and others “chilled me to the bone.”

“I cannot imagine how the state allows guardians to submit their own evaluations and not be accountable to those in their care,” she said. Gossett-Seidman said she and other members of the committee, which includes members from both the House and Senate, intend to “hold these agencies accountable and review our statutes to strengthen them. Besides wasting taxpayer money, we are putting vulnerable populations at risk. In short, I am appalled.” 

Rep. Yvonne Hayes Hinson, a Gainesville Democrat, called Tracy’s remarks to the committee “almost an indictment of a report.” 

Sen. Jay Collins, a Tampa Republican who is one of two lawmakers who chairs the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee, called the report “shocking.”

Collins said the report on guardians was one of several the committee reviewed that involved agencies that had been criticized for the same failings again and again. “We saw many instances of repeat offenders,” Collins said. “People who are just doing this year over year. That’s a problem where they are not taking seriously their fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers. This is money granted by the state. Accountability has to go hand in hand with that.” 

In a letter to the Auditor General that is included in the report, the Department of Elder Affairs’ Secretary, Michelle Branham, acknowledged many of the audit’s findings, and said that most of the improvements either were in the works or would be initiated. 

As to the agency’s poor oversight of guardians, Branham wrote that OPPG “agrees with the Auditor General’s finding that a monitoring tool which promotes a more robust compliance assessment is needed,” She called development of such an instrument “a top priority,” and vowed that it would be done before the end of the budget year.

The agency also vowed to include information about all substantiated complaints against guardians on OPPG’s website. 

Only Maine has a higher percentage than Florida of residents aged 65 or older, with 23 percent to Florida’s 22 percent, according to a May 2024 report by a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

A history of abuse 

For decades, though, Florida has had difficulty protecting incapacitated elders from their own appointed protectors. 

A task force created by the Florida Court Clerks & Comptrollers in 2021 to recommend reforms to the state’s guardianship system heard of numerous abuses, the Florida Bar reported: A mother who took money from her disabled daughter to pay for “lavish” family vacations. A lawyer working as a guardian who paid himself hundreds of thousands in legal fees. A guardian who paid her friends to perform services and collected commissions from selling products to her ward.

More recently, the Miami-Dade Inspector General reported that the Guardianship Program of Dade County had allowed multiple conflicts of interest in the sale of homes owned by elders declared incompetent. 

In one 2015 sale, investigators found an investment company bought the home of a ward for $125,000, then sold it weeks later for $149,000 to the girlfriend of the Guardianship Program property coordinator who helped manage the sale. The couple ended up living there, the Miami Herald reported. 

One of the Guardianship Program’s board members had been a title agent in four property sales involving wards of the program, reported WLRN, which sparked the investigation with a 2023 series on alleged self-dealing among program insiders.

The state Auditor General’s report on the OPPG reserved its strongest criticism for the agency’s woeful oversight system. The audit’s first finding: “Contrary to State law, the OPPG had not developed and implemented an effective monitoring tool to ensure that private professional guardians complied with OPPG standards of practice designed to ensure that wards receive appropriate care and treatment, are safe, and their assets are protected.” 

Lawmakers set aside $18.6 million to the OPPG during the 2023 budget year, which paid for a staff of 11 full-time employees and funded public guardians for 4,294 wards spread across sixteen public guardian offices across the state – including two in Miami-Dade, the Guardianship Program of Dade County and The Guardianship Care Group. 

Between July 2022 and January 2024, the OPPG received 174 complaints against professional guardians, including 138 against guardians who don’t work for one of the 16 public guardians, the audit said. 

“As evidenced by the number and nature of complaints against private professional guardians, effective monitoring of private professional guardians is necessary to promote compliance with OPPG standards of practice and to ensure that wards receive appropriate care and treatment, are safe, and have their assets protected,” the audit said.

The audit added, though, that “the OPPG did not effectively monitor private professional guardians for compliance with OPPG standards of practice.” 

Not only was the brief questionnaire that the OPPG used instead of a “monitoring tool” optional, and without any verification, the audit said, “the OPPG neither compiled the self-reported information for analysis nor analyzed any of the submitted data for indications of noncompliance with the standards of practice.” 

The audit concluded “it is critical that the OPPG establish a robust monitoring tool that effectively evaluates private professional guardian compliance with the standards of practice and, consequently, reduces the risk that wards may not receive appropriate care and treatment, be safely cared for, and have their assets adequately protected.” 

Inaccurate website information 

The Auditor General also criticized OPPG for failing to comply with a state law requiring the agency to maintain a searchable website enabling consumers to evaluate prospective guardians, calling such data “critical information necessary to assess the fitness of a guardian.” The site was to, among other things, specify whether guardians meet requirements for education and bonding, and detail substantiated complaints and professional discipline.

For the 12 guardians who were disciplined during the audit’s time frame, though, the website displayed inaccurate information for seven of them, the audit said, showing only seven of 28 substantiated complaints. One guardian, referred to only as “Guardian A,” had been the subject of 15 substantiated complaints. The website only showed two. 

Among the substantiated complaints not reflected on the website: selling a ward’s car and donating the ward’s possessions to charity without a judge’s order, and isolating wards from their family and friends.

Full Article & Source:
Florida’s elderly guardians operate with little oversight, ‘shocking’ state audit finds

N.J. audit finds no visits for 44% of incapacitated people under state care

By Susan K. Livio 

Employees from the New Jersey Office of the Public Guardian for the Elderly are expected to routinely visit people a judge has found to be unable to make their vital decisions and don’t have family to take on this responsibility.

But a new state audit of the Public Guardian’s records found no documented visits for 44% of these incapacitated people, meaning the employees either skipped the visits, didn’t bother to record them, or a combination of both, according to report released Thursday by the Office of the State Auditor.

The records showed that for 11 of 25 people chosen at random, their care managers were absent from five months to 2-1/2 years, according to the audit.

People 60 and older a judge finds legally are assigned supervision by the public guardian, which oversaw 1,423 active clients in August 2023. Care managers must visit every three months if people live in a nursing home, monthly if they are living in an assisted living or another form of supervised housing or weekly if they live at home.

“A client should be seen more frequently as issues arise, such as hospitalizations and increased behavioral issues,” according to the 19-page audit report.

The audit also found the guardian’s office failed to close the bank accounts for 2,452 people who had died. Collectively, there is $16.9 million that should have been paid to relatives or reimbursed to government entities. One account for a person who died in 2014 held $1.1 million.

The guardian’s office had oversight responsibilities for a couple and their daughter, who should have received $101,700 when her parents died about a decade ago. At the time of the audit, the daughter’s account contained just $143, the audit said.

The audit also found:

• Twenty care managers are given cars to visit people on their caseload, with the expectation they will drive a minimum of 1,250 miles a month. But 10 workers logged less, ranging from 435 miles to 1,206 miles a month. There was no record at all of how much five employees drove or who was using the vehicles.

“By not monitoring state vehicle usage, the Office of the Public Guardian risks being unable to determine if vehicles are needed or whether Care Managers are visiting clients in accordance with statutory requirements,” the audit report said.

• Care managers are permitted to make pre-authorized purchases for clients but receipts are required. Of the 232 purchases made during a period in 2023, 21% lacked a receipt and 43% lacked documentation showing the client received the purchased goods.

The Office of the Public Guardian for the Elderly, overseen by the Department of Human Services, agreed with many of the auditor’s findings. Some of the problems during the audited period — from July 1, 2021 to Sept. 4, 2024 — have been corrected, Helen C. Dodick, the Acting Public Guardian, said in a response to the report.

A new supervisor was hired to oversee the system documenting visits and reports are now generated on a monthly basis, Dodick wrote. Care managers were given laptops and WIFI hotspots so they can enter notes after visits “in real time,” she added.

“Temporary care management staff has been added in order to lower caseloads and increase time for documentation,” Dodick wrote. “Caseloads of senior care management staff are also being reduced where possible to permit them to monitor documentation by more junior care managers.”

Items bought with purchasing cards “are now subject to enhanced review,” Dodick’s statement said.

Full Article & Source:
N.J. audit finds no visits for 44% of incapacitated people under state care

25 Investigates: Audit finds MA Elder Affairs office failed to ensure abuse reported to DAs

By Kerry Kavanaugh and Marina Villeneuve

On its website, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder Affairs says it supports older adults and individuals with disabilities to ‘age in community’ so they can live well and be safe.

But a recent report from the Office of the State Auditor flagged some areas where Elder Affairs has come up short for years – despite promising to make fixes.

“There were gaps in the system and that elders were being put at risk due to a lack of oversight and a lack of controls,” State Auditor Diana DiZoglio said.

DiZoglio said those issues were first brought to the attention of the Executive Office of Elder Affairs years earlier in a previous audit report issued in October of 2018.

“Even though the Executive Office of Elder Affairs said that they had implemented the recommendations made from the previous audit, they hadn’t actually done so,” DiZoglio said.

Regional Protective Service Agencies are required to investigate information from reports of alleged abuse of elders.

Agencies must refer all substantiated reports of serious abuse to the local district attorney.

Agencies are required to make immediate referrals to district attorneys if an elderly person dies because of abuse. And agencies have 48 hours in other instances – including in case of brain damage or sexual assault.

The office had told the state auditor that it began monitoring the district attorney referral process as of February 2019.

But during the course of the current audit, the office told the auditor it wasn’t running monthly queries of its system to figure out whether all required incidents of elder abuse were referred to a district attorney.

“Unfortunately, it took us conducting an entirely new audit of the same things we had audited previously to uncover the fact that Elder Affairs had not done what they said they had done,” she added.

Among the concerns listed in the audit:

• The office did not establish controls to ensure all applicable incidents of elder abuse are reported to district attorneys’ offices for investigations.
• And the office wasn’t monitoring the use of certain tools to ensure they’re properly assessing the decisional capacity of elders.

“That’s unacceptable,” she said. “It puts elders at risk and it wastes taxpayer dollars.”

Her audit found that the office’s failure to monitor district attorney referrals “put elders at risk of continued abuse.”

In the initial audit, the report found seven instances in which the office did not properly report allegations of abuse to DAs.

25 Investigates reached out to the Executive Office of Elder Affairs and asked to speak with Secretary Elizabeth Chen.

They declined an interview but a spokesperson said in a statement: “We are actively taking steps to address the recommendations in the auditor’s report and to strengthen this process on behalf of the people we serve.”

The office launched a program to improve training and monitoring of regional agency staff.

The spokesperson also said the office has now implemented a monthly reporting system to monitor how regional Protective Services Agencies are reporting allegations of abuse to district attorney’s offices.

The office told the auditor that it’s working on an automated system to monitor DA referrals over the next year.

The issues raised in the audit are in line with a trend we’ve heard from Boston 25 News viewers.

“I’m just so glad someone is listening to my story,” Kathy Mcleod, who’s fighting for answers about the death of her brother following a fall at a nursing home, told Anchor and Investigative Reporter Kerry Kavanaugh. “Finally, for him. I just want justice for him.”

Family members have told us they reached out to various state and local agencies asking for help for loved ones in nursing homes – and got nowhere.

“We want our elderly population to be able to trust that they’re in good hands and that if there is potential abuse, that it’s going to be reported in an effective and efficient manner,” DiZoglio said.

Elder abuse includes physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, caretaker neglect, financial exploitation, and self-neglect.

Elder Abuse reports can be filed 24 hours a day either online or by phone at (800) 922-2275.

McLeod said she called that very number in February of 2023 to report what happened to her brother.

He had dementia, wandered into another patient’s room, fell, suffered a fracture and died as a result of his injury earlier that month.

She says she never even got a call back.

Full Article & Source:
25 Investigates: Audit finds MA Elder Affairs office failed to ensure abuse reported to DAs

Unguarded: Michigan’s guardianship system leaves vulnerable exposed

BY MARDI LINK and LUCA POWELL 

George Pappas poses for a portrait with his Toyota Prius outside his apartment in Harbor Springs on Thursday. Elise Page was appointed as Pappas’s conservator in 2019. Page was convicted of embezzlement in 2021 for stealing thousands of dollars from Pappas.

Record-Eagle/Mike Krebs

A conservator who took a 95-year-old man’s debit card on a shopping spree at Victoria’s Secret.

Another who hasn’t accounted for $17,000 from the sale of a 74-year-old man’s land, and a third on trial, accused of embezzling funds from 11 vulnerable individuals.

Record-Eagle reporters in August 2021 began examining records in 10 of Michigan’s probate courts. They found a steady stream of worrisome stories ranging from family isolation to outright theft.

The stories involve people of means and those on fixed incomes, people who live independently and those who require residential care, those with close family members and those without, but all have one thing in common: They begin with a judicial decision meant to protect them by appointing a guardian or conservator.

Anecdotally, thousands of guardians and conservators — acting as fiduciaries — serve in their roles without running afoul of the law. Still, they are barely monitored by the courts that hand them the keys to a person’s estate. The State of Michigan has no rules governing who can serve as an appointed guardian so long as the person is older than 18. Often, vulnerable adults have little control over some of the most important decisions in their life — like where they live, who they can see, and how their savings are spent.

Decades of reform attempts by governors, attorneys general and legislators failed to alter the Michigan judiciary, which controls guardianship, keeping a casual eye on a system that lets bad actors harm the vulnerable.

During a nine-month investigation, Record-Eagle reporters found the following:

• 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.

George Pappas holds a photo of himself and his late wife, Geneva, at his apartment in Harbor Springs.

Record-Eagle/Mike Krebs

Robbed of money and dignity

In early December 2020, George Pappas had to pay his utility bill.

At 95, it was a point of pride for Pappas that he could drive, even though he’d recently had a conservator appointed to manage his money. After Pappas’ wife, Geneva, died in 2019, Pappas said he tried to keep up with daily chores, but eventually told a social worker at a local Veterans Administration office he needed help.

Pappas asked if someone could schedule his dental appointments, arrange to have the brakes on his car fixed and help arrange a pre-paid burial.

Records show the social worker told him he needed a conservator and referred Pappas to Emmet County Probate Court. Judge Valerie Snyder appointed a Harbor Springs woman named Elise Page.

Probate courts in Michigan are run by elected probate judges, and with no backgrounding rules from the state, the judges have latitude on how to find and vet the guardians and conservators they appoint.

In Page’s case, court staff asked the sheriff’s department to run a background check before adding her to a list of those willing to serve. That check found no criminal convictions; yet records kept across the hall in district court show a number of debt collection cases, all since closed, filed against her. Unpaid loans, a bounced check to a Petoskey florist, and debt for medical services.

Soon after her appointment, Page closed Pappas’ bank account, moved his money to a credit union and applied for a debit card in her own name. Ten days later, Page went on a shopping spree at vape shops, fast food drive-thrus and Victoria’s Secret.

She was eventually caught, but not by the court. Pappas paid his utility bill with a check from his old bank account and when it bounced, he told a clerk at city hall. The clerk called the police.

By then, Page had transferred $63,665 from Pappas’ old bank account — his entire balance — into the new credit union account, police records show. During the next few weeks, Page withdrew $10,300 in cash and spent another $3,615 with the debit card.

Dressed in a robin’s egg blue suit, Pappas testified righteously at the sentencing hearing after Page was convicted of fraud in the case.

“My wife worked 30 years to earn money and this person took advantage of that, blood money, for her prosperity and her hunger,” said Pappas.

Pappas’s story speaks to the casual accountability mechanisms in place for guardians and conservators. Conservators have about two months to tell a court how much money they’re responsible for. After that, they file annual reports with line items detailing expenses. Courts don’t require receipts and these financial reports are often as brief as, “Rent: $7,000,” “Car: $4,000.”

If anything looks fishy, casting the net to catch the fish isn’t the court’s job. Michigan probate courts are only responsible for monitoring whether guardians and conservators file financial and other documents on time and that these documents are sent to “interested parties.”

It’s those interested parties — a spouse, a daughter or son, siblings or staff with a government benefit agency like Social Security — and not the court who bear responsibility for ferreting out wrongdoing.

“The court is not an investigative body, it’s a paperwork body,” said private practice attorney Patrick Cherry, of Cadillac, a special assistant attorney general in dozens of guardianship and conservatorship cases, under contract with Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office.

Interested parties are not generally attorneys or accountants. Often they are family members who may have little experience with probate court matters and may not know they have the right to object to discrepancies.

“In my experience objections to accountings are fairly rare,” Cherry said.

In Pappas’ case, bank records show Page spent Pappas’ money weeks before the first accounting was due to the court.

‘Easy opportunity for exploitation’

Expenses made by conservator Elise Page on the account of
George Pappas, a 95-year-old WWII veteran who was appointed
a conservator in Emmet County. Page was convicted of
embezzlement in 2021.
Courtesy of George Pappas

In Grand Traverse County, former Probate Judge Melanie Stanton balked at the idea that courts should monitor the fiduciaries they assign. Stanton, who retired in 2021, said probate staff don’t have time, nor do they have access to LEIN — the statewide police backgrounding database. Probate courts also don’t have the flexibility to pick and choose who they put in charge, because there’s a lack of available guardians.

“A court doesn’t do an investigation,” Stanton said. “That’s not my role.”

In 2020, Stanton was tasked with sorting out the guardianship and conservatorship of Martha Rothaug, a Leelanau County woman with a significant estate and feuding adult children. Judges often appoint outside guardians in cases where siblings appear to be vying for a parent’s money. In Rothaug’s case, a woman named Jill Case was appointed in 2017 by Leelanau County Probate Judge Larry Nelson.

Case moved Martha out of her home and into a nursing home and transferred more than $500,000 in savings from her local account at Merrill Lynch. The action prompted a colleague of Jon Shubert, Martha’s financial planner, to file a suspicious activity report naming Case.

Unbeknownst to either court, Case had a years-long disciplinary record at her job at the Grand Traverse County’s Commission on Aging. Managers reprimanded her for bullying colleagues to tears, records in her personnel file show. Separately, Case’s paycheck had also been garnished in civil court — a legal recourse used to recoup money when a person has an unpaid debt.

Judge Nelson declined comment on Martha Rothaug’s guardianship. Jill Case also declined, saying, “the news has not done me justice in the past involving Jennifer Rodgers.” Rodgers is Martha Rothaug’s daughter, and much of Rothaug’s saga was first reported in the 2017 story “Fighting for Mom” in the Northern Express.

“The court thought Jill Case would be better to take care of my mother than her own daughter,” Rodgers told the Record-Eagle. “She loved the power.”

In Antrim County, the family of a 74-year-old man, Thomas Dobrzelewski, has been at odds with his former conservator concerning $23,000 they say hasn’t been accounted for following the sale of a portion of Thomas’ land. The family has filed paperwork with the probate court questioning expenses – including home repairs and shopping trips to Walmart — where his conservator spent thousands of dollars.

Dobrzelewski’s conservator, Vicki Hamlin-Rogers denied any wrongdoing, but has yet to show the family receipts, court records show.

When one of Dobrzelewski’s children took over their father’s conservatorship, the family found he had $1,475 to his name. When his wife died, Dobrzelewski did not have enough money to afford her headstone.

The Dobrzelewskis declined to comment on the case, but said they hoped their father’s guardianship saga could be instructive for fixing guardianship broadly.

“The current system provides easy opportunity for the exploitation of our most vulnerable population by the very courts and conservators and/or guardians charged with protecting them,” the family told the Record-Eagle in an emailed statement. “Many of the most vulnerable have no capability to challenge the fiduciary decisions and accountings made by conservators and/or guardians.”

Hamlin-Rogers is a professional guardian based in Emmet County. She has more than 20 wards between Emmet, Otsego, Charlevoix, Grand Traverse and Antrim probate courts. In Charlevoix, the Record-Eagle found Hamlin-Rogers had expensed $20,000 for “home repairs” in another conservatorship, not unlike some expenses flagged by the Dobrzelewskis in Antrim.

George Pappas’s discharge papers hang on his refrigerator at his
apartment in Harbor Springs on Thursday. Pappas is a World
War II veteran.
Record-Eagle/Mike Krebs

Charlevoix Court Probate Registrar Mary Clees said Judge Valerie K. Snyder – the same judge who appointed Elise Page to George Pappas – looks at every receipt meticulously, but that no public records exist detailing Hamlin-Rogers’ expenses.

Reached for comment, Hamlin-Rogers said that she had nothing to add to the Dobrzelewski case beyond the vacate order issued by the court. She did not reply to a question regarding her expenses on her Charlevoix conservatorship.

The family’s dispute was being mediated via the Antrim Probate Court, but has been paused pending the outcome of a referral of Hamlin-Rogers’ case to the Michigan State Police. Antrim County Prosecutor James Rossiter confirmed he is reviewing an MSP investigation into accusations of embezzlement passed to his office in October 2021 to determine whether to levy criminal charges in the case.

In cases where guardians or conservators run afoul of the law, making a victim whole again isn’t a sure thing.

Page, Pappas’ former conservator, was prosecuted for embezzlement, convicted and sentenced to pay $15,269 in court costs and restitution, plus spend 11 months in jail. She served five months, with the remainder held in abeyance, and is currently on probation. Page declined to comment for this story through her attorney, Jonathan Steffy.

Pappas will turn 97 in September and said he’s dissatisfied with how the court handled his case. He did receive a $2,500 check in the mail from a victim restitution fund, and Page is expected to get a job and pay back the money she owes to Pappas and to the court.

But probation documents state, for now, Page can pay court costs in monthly installments of $30.

At that rate, Pappas won’t be repaid until he’s 138 years old.

‘Putting blinders on’

Mack
Courtesy of Milton Mack Jr.

Months into his first term in office, Judge Milton Mack Jr. wanted to mend fences.

Mack was less than a year into his new job as state court administrator, a position which oversees every court in Michigan and is housed within the State Court Administrative Office.

A decade before his appointment, a Michigan Auditor General’s report cited numerous flaws in how probate judges monitored conservators. The auditors wrote that judges were “generally not effective” in monitoring conservatorships, and that SCAO should revisit how Michigan’s probate courts review annual accountings.

Mack said the probate judges bristled at the auditor’s conclusions, and at SCAO’s lack of support. He argued that law changes in 2001 altered the responsibilities of probate courts; before the code was changed judges were required to look at detailed receipts, afterward they were only to request detailed receipts if a complaint was raised about the conservators’ spending.

“The criticism was just factually wrong, and SCAO did not back us up in the beginning,” said Mack, who was the Chief Judge of Wayne County Probate Court at the time.

So Mack set out to rebuild trust between probate judges and SCAO.

Mack encouraged probate judges to begin influencing SCAO, allowing them to help pick regional administrators and have a say on guidelines regarding guardians, he said. The overarching focus was on strategies that were inexpensive and effective, building off the premise “that complicated doesn’t get stuff done,” Mack said.

One of those changes was to eliminate the requirement for local courts to tell his office about negligent guardians.

In a memo from July 2016, Mack told Michigan probate court officials they no longer needed to tell SCAO the names of conservators or guardians who fail to write in about their wards’ condition, or those whose annual financial accountings are deficient. Instead, the courts should just tell the SCAO how many cases were deficient. The changes, the memo explained, were done in the name of “streamlining.”

“When possible, SCAO reduces or eliminates reports to strike a better balance between reporting levels and effective oversight,” the memo states. “This month, SCAO streamlined the Deficiencies in Guardianship/Conservatorship Administration Report (SCAO 65) by eliminating Part B. Effective immediately, the report will no longer include a detailed list of deficiencies, with the case number, name of fiduciary, date, type, and court action for every deficiency over the past six months.”

A Record-Eagle reporter asked Mack why the state wouldn’t want to track the names of deficient guardians. Mack said his office didn’t need those names, that the reports created more paperwork, and that when they arrived at SCAO’s office in Lansing, they were being filed away in a cabinet.

“Having all those names doesn’t help SCAO do its job and it’s extra work for the courts that is nonproductive,” Mack said. “It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Mack served at the head of SCAO until 2020, when he became State Court Administrator Emeritus – a position newly created for him. Mack said one of his roles is to advise the new Administrator Thomas Boyd, on issues like guardianship, where Mack has expertise.

One of Mack’s critics is Bradley Geller, former legal counsel to the Washtenaw County Probate Court and director of the Michigan Center for Law and Aging. Geller said Mack’s tenure at the SCAO weakened an already ineffective oversight apparatus.

Geller said state court officials have no idea how many professional guardians operate in Michigan, or how many wards some of these guardians have. He said the same “willful ignorance” guided the decision to curtail court reporting.

“In other words it’s like putting blinders on,” said Geller. “The less you know, the less obligation you have to actually administer the courts.That’s consistent with Milton Mack and it’s consistent with SCAO.”

Geller is a vocal and longtime critic of Michigan’s guardianship system. In 2017, Geller attempted to sue every probate court in the state in federal court. In his complaint, Geller wrote that judges and state agencies were failing to dismantle a “good old boys club” which was inappropriately institutionalizing vulnerable people to the advantage of lawyers, guardians and judges. Geller’s case was dismissed on a lack of subject matter jurisdiction.

Geller himself was terminated from his job as probate counsel at the Washtenaw County Probate Court in 2004. Geller said he was fired alongside a number of probate court staff by then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Maura Corrigan. The firings came in the wake of a state audit that detailed lax oversight of conservators by Washtenaw County Probate Court staff.

Mack said that his work didn’t weaken SCAO’s oversight and that his form is still effective without names. A better solution, Mack said, lies in a $175 million proposal to digitize and unify Michigan’s courts, a proposal that Mack put forth in 2018 but that has not moved since then. Shared record-keeping would allow SCAO to easily spot bad actors working across Michigan counties.

SCAO isn’t the only state office with oversight responsibility, however. The Michigan Attorney General also plays a role by appointing public administrators. Public administrators are guardians for entire counties who take the cases of wards who have no relatives. They also handle estates, and are supposed to distribute the remaining money in an estate according to a decedent’s will.

These administrators have come under public scrutiny, and even been fired, and yet some retain guardianships and conservatorships.

Attorney General Dana Nessel and former AG Bill Schuette terminated a handful of public administrators following media reports of questionable attorneys fees and assets not being turned over to rightful heirs. But despite being fired, the same former administrators retained an unknown number of guardianship and conservatorship cases.

Schuette in 2017 fired Oakland County public administrators Barbara Andruccioli and Jon Munger; former Macomb County public administrator Cecil St. Pierre resigned after being suspended. Nessel in 2019 fired administrators Jennifer Carney, Thomas Fraser and John Yun, also of Oakland County, as well as Robert Kirk, a public administrator in Macomb County.

John Munger has no active cases in Oakland County, but Jennifer Carney has 415 open or adjudicated cases, Thomas Fraser has 560 open or adjudicated cases and John Yun has 577 open or adjudicated cases, court records show.

An Oakland County Probate Court representative defined an adjudicated case as a case in which a judge has ruled, sometimes adding a co-guardian or discharging one guardian and replacing them with another, though the case may still come before the court for further rulings.

In many and perhaps even most of the above cases, Carney, Yun and Fraser may no longer have an active role, though data on the court’s website is inexact and all three are listed on the county’s Professional Guardian List.

Katharyn Barron, appointed in 2019 as Michigan’s public administrator, said she didn’t view this as a problem.

“Just because we removed them from their job as county public admin, that had nothing to do with their role as a guardian or conservator for individuals,” Barron said. “The court appoints them not because they’re the county public admin, but because they’re a private attorney.”

Andruccioli in 2018 was hired as Oakland County’s probate register and continues in that role today.

Meanwhile, there are also some 1,600 people under guardianship in Michigan with no immediate relatives. These cases all default to the Attorney General, who, by law, is the last person of interest in a case when there is no one else.

Under Nessel, it is Barron’s duty as state public administrator to blow the whistle on any questionable reports or annual accountings submitted by her wards’ guardians and conservators.

An unknown number of these are filed in undigitized courts across the state and are labor-intensive to track.

Barron is also the chair of Nessel’s Elder Abuse Task Force, where she coordinates a committee of more than 100 officials, lawyers, elder advocates and politicians, seeking to improve life for the state’s elderly.

Still, Barron said she checks on “each and every one” of these 1,600 cases, something she’s been able to accomplish with the help of remote court hearings, her office manager and a contracted law student.

Failures of reform

Elected Michigan officials have been trying to fix guardianship for decades, though each attempt has yielded little real change.

Murmurings of guardianship abuse in Michigan emerged in 1996. The Associated Press reported on the for-profit businesses of Alan May, a Wayne County professional guardian, and on guardians across the state with self-dealing arrangements between nursing homes and conservators.

Since then, elected officials established committee after committee to study the issue. For example, in 1996, the State Supreme Court convened a task force on guardianship reform. They produced 11 recommendations, including that “minimum ethical standards for professional guardians and professional conservators should be promulgated and enforced.”

Three years after those reforms were instituted, a 2003 report from the Office of the Auditor General showed problems in the probate courts. Auditors took a sampling of cases from Washtenaw, Wayne, Huron, Calhoun and Jackson counties. In one court, the auditors found 44 out of 114 annual accountings filed by conservators should not have been approved.

“For example, in 1 case a conservator reported annual expenditures of $37,198, but documented expenditures of only $27,717. In another case, a conservator reported nursing home expenditures of $15,558 but provided documentation supporting only $4,740,” the audit states.

In 2005, then-Governor Jennifer Granholm established another task force. This one also recommended minimum standards for guardians. The task force warned that “incidence of elder abuse is likely to rise significantly” over the next 20 years,” owing to Michigan’s aging population.

The recommendations led to no new legislation. When state auditors returned in 2012, they found the state court administrators had only complied with a few of the recommendations made in 2003.

Again, auditors recommended more oversight. And again, SCAO officials agreed.

The office would revamp its use of SCAO 65, officials promised, which would help probate courts identify conservators and guardians with “repeated deficiencies.”

This was the same form that, under the administration of Milton Mack, was “streamlined” to exclude names entirely – making it useless in terms of identifying specific bad actors.

In 2019, Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the creation of the latest Elder Abuse Task Force. Since its inception more than 100 members — judges, lawyers, guardians, advocates, accountants – have met monthly via Zoom. Reforming guardianships, conservatorships and court practices is one of the task force’s goals.

Chief among them was the idea that guardians should be certified — effectively licensed – by an agency such as Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. LARA already oversees licenses of professions from nursing, medicine, child care and even barbers.

Reformers have urged lawmakers to pass a certification requirement since the 1990s, which would mandate education, training, background checks and insurance bonding for guardians and conservators.

Salli Pung, the state’s long-term care ombudsman, chairs the task force’s subcommittee on certification, something which is already a requirement in 14 U.S. states.

“If we’re going to require certification for a dog groomer, we should be requiring it for people who are responsible for every aspect of someone’s life,” Pung said.

Only two of Nessel’s task force’s many initiatives have so far been accomplished. Banks must now report fraud of vulnerable adults and there’s a new form for law enforcement to use when reporting that fraud.

The fate of the other seven — including certification – is tied to proposed legislation stalled in the House Judiciary Committee since June 2021.

Members of the task force said the proposed legislation has elicited objections from trade groups representing judges and guardians.

Judge John Tomlinson, president of the Probate Judges Association, said the initial package would slow the court’s ability to deal with emergent guardianship cases. “PJA couldn’t approve the first package of bills,” Tomlinson said.

The Michigan Guardianship Association also publicly opposed the package, including certification requirements that would require regular visits and limits on the number of wards a guardian can accept. The organization has spent $18,000 per year in lobbying expenses.

MGA representative Georgia Callis in March agreed to an interview with Record-Eagle reporters, canceled a scheduled interview, then stopped responding to requests to reschedule.

Guardians and judges have traditionally opposed oversight measures, such as capping how many wards can be assigned to one guardian.

If there’s money in a person’s estate, a guardian makes $83 per month, or about $1,000 per year. To make minimum wage, a professional guardian would need at least 20 wards.

Mack and Tomlinson said many shoot for 30 or more, on the assumption that some cases will be managed pro bono.

Judges have expressed concern over whether “capping” would leave thousands of vulnerable people in Michigan unguarded. According to Milton Mack, it’s very likely that the first wards to be dropped would be those being served pro-bono.

Mack said he was worried that, by regulating guardians, the new task force might actually end up leaving hundreds of vulnerable adults out to dry.

Legislation proposed by the task force is now in its third revision, and has been modified significantly.

If passed, the new law no longer would “cap” the number of wards a guardian can be appointed to serve, for example. Other changes have also been edited out of the initial bills, including requirements for guardians to personally visit their wards.

Several members of Granholm’s 2006 task force described their previous efforts as fruitless, in part because of pushback from guardians and judges.

“I don’t remember that there was a lot of change. I think I would have celebrated it if there was,” said Sharon L. Gire, a task force member and former director of Michigan’s Office of Services to the Aging.

“And there certainly were professionals in the field – attorneys who make a living – who were very concerned about not having too much control over what they do,” Gire said.

Barron vowed Nessel’s task force won’t have similarly insubstantial results.

“We’re not a task force that is going to write a report and then pat ourselves on the back and ride off into the sunset,” Barron said. “We’re not report-writers. We’re initiative accomplishers.”

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who was also on the 2006 task force, said she’s skeptical.

“That’s what they said the last time. That’s not what happened. The task force met, we had some very good discussion, it was a very comprehensive report, and then literally nothing happened,” said Worthy.

Full Article & Source:

Unguarded: Michigan’s guardianship system leaves vulnerable exposed

Michigan’s guardianship system leaves vulnerable exposed

BY MARDI LINK and LUCA POWELL 

George Pappas poses for a portrait with his Toyota Prius outside his apartment in Harbor Springs on Thursday. Elise Page was appointed as Pappas’s conservator in 2019. Page was convicted of embezzlement in 2021 for stealing thousands of dollars from Pappas.

Record-Eagle/Mike Krebs

A conservator who took a 95-year-old man’s debit card on a shopping spree at Victoria’s Secret.

Another who hasn’t accounted for $17,000 from the sale of a 74-year-old man’s land, and a third on trial, accused of embezzling funds from 11 vulnerable individuals.

Record-Eagle reporters in August 2021 began examining records in 10 of Michigan’s probate courts. They found a steady stream of worrisome stories ranging from family isolation to outright theft.

The stories involve people of means and those on fixed incomes, people who live independently and those who require residential care, those with close family members and those without, but all have one thing in common: They begin with a judicial decision meant to protect them by appointing a guardian or conservator.

Anecdotally, thousands of guardians and conservators — acting as fiduciaries — serve in their roles without running afoul of the law. Still, they are barely monitored by the courts that hand them the keys to a person’s estate. The State of Michigan has no rules governing who can serve as an appointed guardian so long as the person is older than 18. Often, vulnerable adults have little control over some of the most important decisions in their life — like where they live, who they can see, and how their savings are spent.

Decades of reform attempts by governors, attorneys general and legislators failed to alter the Michigan judiciary, which controls guardianship, keeping a casual eye on a system that lets bad actors harm the vulnerable.

During a nine-month investigation, Record-Eagle reporters found the following:

• 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.

George Pappas holds a photo of himself and his late wife, Geneva, at his apartment in Harbor Springs.

Record-Eagle/Mike Krebs

Robbed of money and dignity

In early December 2020, George Pappas had to pay his utility bill.

At 95, it was a point of pride for Pappas that he could drive, even though he’d recently had a conservator appointed to manage his money. After Pappas’ wife, Geneva, died in 2019, Pappas said he tried to keep up with daily chores, but eventually told a social worker at a local Veterans Administration office he needed help.

Pappas asked if someone could schedule his dental appointments, arrange to have the brakes on his car fixed and help arrange a pre-paid burial.

Records show the social worker told him he needed a conservator and referred Pappas to Emmet County Probate Court. Judge Valerie Snyder appointed a Harbor Springs woman named Elise Page.

Probate courts in Michigan are run by elected probate judges, and with no backgrounding rules from the state, the judges have latitude on how to find and vet the guardians and conservators they appoint.

In Page’s case, court staff asked the sheriff’s department to run a background check before adding her to a list of those willing to serve. That check found no criminal convictions; yet records kept across the hall in district court show a number of debt collection cases, all since closed, filed against her. Unpaid loans, a bounced check to a Petoskey florist, and debt for medical services.

Soon after her appointment, Page closed Pappas’ bank account, moved his money to a credit union and applied for a debit card in her own name. Ten days later, Page went on a shopping spree at vape shops, fast food drive-thrus and Victoria’s Secret.

She was eventually caught, but not by the court. Pappas paid his utility bill with a check from his old bank account and when it bounced, he told a clerk at city hall. The clerk called the police.

By then, Page had transferred $63,665 from Pappas’ old bank account — his entire balance — into the new credit union account, police records show. During the next few weeks, Page withdrew $10,300 in cash and spent another $3,615 with the debit card.

Dressed in a robin’s egg blue suit, Pappas testified righteously at the sentencing hearing after Page was convicted of fraud in the case.

“My wife worked 30 years to earn money and this person took advantage of that, blood money, for her prosperity and her hunger,” said Pappas.

Pappas’s story speaks to the casual accountability mechanisms in place for guardians and conservators. Conservators have about two months to tell a court how much money they’re responsible for. After that, they file annual reports with line items detailing expenses. Courts don’t require receipts and these financial reports are often as brief as, “Rent: $7,000,” “Car: $4,000.”

If anything looks fishy, casting the net to catch the fish isn’t the court’s job. Michigan probate courts are only responsible for monitoring whether guardians and conservators file financial and other documents on time and that these documents are sent to “interested parties.”

It’s those interested parties — a spouse, a daughter or son, siblings or staff with a government benefit agency like Social Security — and not the court who bear responsibility for ferreting out wrongdoing.

“The court is not an investigative body, it’s a paperwork body,” said private practice attorney Patrick Cherry, of Cadillac, a special assistant attorney general in dozens of guardianship and conservatorship cases, under contract with Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office.

Interested parties are not generally attorneys or accountants. Often they are family members who may have little experience with probate court matters and may not know they have the right to object to discrepancies.

“In my experience objections to accountings are fairly rare,” Cherry said.

In Pappas’ case, bank records show Page spent Pappas’ money weeks before the first accounting was due to the court.

‘Easy opportunity for exploitation’

Expenses made by conservator Elise Page on the account of
George Pappas, a 95-year-old WWII veteran who was appointed
a conservator in Emmet County. Page was convicted of
embezzlement in 2021.
Courtesy of George Pappas

In Grand Traverse County, former Probate Judge Melanie Stanton balked at the idea that courts should monitor the fiduciaries they assign. Stanton, who retired in 2021, said probate staff don’t have time, nor do they have access to LEIN — the statewide police backgrounding database. Probate courts also don’t have the flexibility to pick and choose who they put in charge, because there’s a lack of available guardians.

“A court doesn’t do an investigation,” Stanton said. “That’s not my role.”

In 2020, Stanton was tasked with sorting out the guardianship and conservatorship of Martha Rothaug, a Leelanau County woman with a significant estate and feuding adult children. Judges often appoint outside guardians in cases where siblings appear to be vying for a parent’s money. In Rothaug’s case, a woman named Jill Case was appointed in 2017 by Leelanau County Probate Judge Larry Nelson.

Case moved Martha out of her home and into a nursing home and transferred more than $500,000 in savings from her local account at Merrill Lynch. The action prompted a colleague of Jon Shubert, Martha’s financial planner, to file a suspicious activity report naming Case.

Unbeknownst to either court, Case had a years-long disciplinary record at her job at the Grand Traverse County’s Commission on Aging. Managers reprimanded her for bullying colleagues to tears, records in her personnel file show. Separately, Case’s paycheck had also been garnished in civil court — a legal recourse used to recoup money when a person has an unpaid debt.

Judge Nelson declined comment on Martha Rothaug’s guardianship. Jill Case also declined, saying, “the news has not done me justice in the past involving Jennifer Rodgers.” Rodgers is Martha Rothaug’s daughter, and much of Rothaug’s saga was first reported in the 2017 story “Fighting for Mom” in the Northern Express.

“The court thought Jill Case would be better to take care of my mother than her own daughter,” Rodgers told the Record-Eagle. “She loved the power.”

In Antrim County, the family of a 74-year-old man, Thomas Dobrzelewski, has been at odds with his former conservator concerning $23,000 they say hasn’t been accounted for following the sale of a portion of Thomas’ land. The family has filed paperwork with the probate court questioning expenses – including home repairs and shopping trips to Walmart — where his conservator spent thousands of dollars.

Dobrzelewski’s conservator, Vicki Hamlin-Rogers denied any wrongdoing, but has yet to show the family receipts, court records show.

When one of Dobrzelewski’s children took over their father’s conservatorship, the family found he had $1,475 to his name. When his wife died, Dobrzelewski did not have enough money to afford her headstone.

The Dobrzelewskis declined to comment on the case, but said they hoped their father’s guardianship saga could be instructive for fixing guardianship broadly.

“The current system provides easy opportunity for the exploitation of our most vulnerable population by the very courts and conservators and/or guardians charged with protecting them,” the family told the Record-Eagle in an emailed statement. “Many of the most vulnerable have no capability to challenge the fiduciary decisions and accountings made by conservators and/or guardians.”

Hamlin-Rogers is a professional guardian based in Emmet County. She has more than 20 wards between Emmet, Otsego, Charlevoix, Grand Traverse and Antrim probate courts. In Charlevoix, the Record-Eagle found Hamlin-Rogers had expensed $20,000 for “home repairs” in another conservatorship, not unlike some expenses flagged by the Dobrzelewskis in Antrim.

George Pappas’s discharge papers hang on his refrigerator at his
apartment in Harbor Springs on Thursday. Pappas is a World
War II veteran.
Record-Eagle/Mike Krebs

Charlevoix Court Probate Registrar Mary Clees said Judge Valerie K. Snyder – the same judge who appointed Elise Page to George Pappas – looks at every receipt meticulously, but that no public records exist detailing Hamlin-Rogers’ expenses.

Reached for comment, Hamlin-Rogers said that she had nothing to add to the Dobrzelewski case beyond the vacate order issued by the court. She did not reply to a question regarding her expenses on her Charlevoix conservatorship.

The family’s dispute was being mediated via the Antrim Probate Court, but has been paused pending the outcome of a referral of Hamlin-Rogers’ case to the Michigan State Police. Antrim County Prosecutor James Rossiter confirmed he is reviewing an MSP investigation into accusations of embezzlement passed to his office in October 2021 to determine whether to levy criminal charges in the case.

In cases where guardians or conservators run afoul of the law, making a victim whole again isn’t a sure thing.

Page, Pappas’ former conservator, was prosecuted for embezzlement, convicted and sentenced to pay $15,269 in court costs and restitution, plus spend 11 months in jail. She served five months, with the remainder held in abeyance, and is currently on probation. Page declined to comment for this story through her attorney, Jonathan Steffy.

Pappas will turn 97 in September and said he’s dissatisfied with how the court handled his case. He did receive a $2,500 check in the mail from a victim restitution fund, and Page is expected to get a job and pay back the money she owes to Pappas and to the court.

But probation documents state, for now, Page can pay court costs in monthly installments of $30.

At that rate, Pappas won’t be repaid until he’s 138 years old.

‘Putting blinders on’

Mack
Courtesy of Milton Mack Jr.

Months into his first term in office, Judge Milton Mack Jr. wanted to mend fences.

Mack was less than a year into his new job as state court administrator, a position which oversees every court in Michigan and is housed within the State Court Administrative Office.

A decade before his appointment, a Michigan Auditor General’s report cited numerous flaws in how probate judges monitored conservators. The auditors wrote that judges were “generally not effective” in monitoring conservatorships, and that SCAO should revisit how Michigan’s probate courts review annual accountings.

Mack said the probate judges bristled at the auditor’s conclusions, and at SCAO’s lack of support. He argued that law changes in 2001 altered the responsibilities of probate courts; before the code was changed judges were required to look at detailed receipts, afterward they were only to request detailed receipts if a complaint was raised about the conservators’ spending.

“The criticism was just factually wrong, and SCAO did not back us up in the beginning,” said Mack, who was the Chief Judge of Wayne County Probate Court at the time.

So Mack set out to rebuild trust between probate judges and SCAO.

Mack encouraged probate judges to begin influencing SCAO, allowing them to help pick regional administrators and have a say on guidelines regarding guardians, he said. The overarching focus was on strategies that were inexpensive and effective, building off the premise “that complicated doesn’t get stuff done,” Mack said.

One of those changes was to eliminate the requirement for local courts to tell his office about negligent guardians.

In a memo from July 2016, Mack told Michigan probate court officials they no longer needed to tell SCAO the names of conservators or guardians who fail to write in about their wards’ condition, or those whose annual financial accountings are deficient. Instead, the courts should just tell the SCAO how many cases were deficient. The changes, the memo explained, were done in the name of “streamlining.”

“When possible, SCAO reduces or eliminates reports to strike a better balance between reporting levels and effective oversight,” the memo states. “This month, SCAO streamlined the Deficiencies in Guardianship/Conservatorship Administration Report (SCAO 65) by eliminating Part B. Effective immediately, the report will no longer include a detailed list of deficiencies, with the case number, name of fiduciary, date, type, and court action for every deficiency over the past six months.”

A Record-Eagle reporter asked Mack why the state wouldn’t want to track the names of deficient guardians. Mack said his office didn’t need those names, that the reports created more paperwork, and that when they arrived at SCAO’s office in Lansing, they were being filed away in a cabinet.

“Having all those names doesn’t help SCAO do its job and it’s extra work for the courts that is nonproductive,” Mack said. “It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Mack served at the head of SCAO until 2020, when he became State Court Administrator Emeritus – a position newly created for him. Mack said one of his roles is to advise the new Administrator Thomas Boyd, on issues like guardianship, where Mack has expertise.

One of Mack’s critics is Bradley Geller, former legal counsel to the Washtenaw County Probate Court and director of the Michigan Center for Law and Aging. Geller said Mack’s tenure at the SCAO weakened an already ineffective oversight apparatus.

Geller said state court officials have no idea how many professional guardians operate in Michigan, or how many wards some of these guardians have. He said the same “willful ignorance” guided the decision to curtail court reporting.

“In other words it’s like putting blinders on,” said Geller. “The less you know, the less obligation you have to actually administer the courts.That’s consistent with Milton Mack and it’s consistent with SCAO.”

Geller is a vocal and longtime critic of Michigan’s guardianship system. In 2017, Geller attempted to sue every probate court in the state in federal court. In his complaint, Geller wrote that judges and state agencies were failing to dismantle a “good old boys club” which was inappropriately institutionalizing vulnerable people to the advantage of lawyers, guardians and judges. Geller’s case was dismissed on a lack of subject matter jurisdiction.

Geller himself was terminated from his job as probate counsel at the Washtenaw County Probate Court in 2004. Geller said he was fired alongside a number of probate court staff by then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Maura Corrigan. The firings came in the wake of a state audit that detailed lax oversight of conservators by Washtenaw County Probate Court staff.

Mack said that his work didn’t weaken SCAO’s oversight and that his form is still effective without names. A better solution, Mack said, lies in a $175 million proposal to digitize and unify Michigan’s courts, a proposal that Mack put forth in 2018 but that has not moved since then. Shared record-keeping would allow SCAO to easily spot bad actors working across Michigan counties.

SCAO isn’t the only state office with oversight responsibility, however. The Michigan Attorney General also plays a role by appointing public administrators. Public administrators are guardians for entire counties who take the cases of wards who have no relatives. They also handle estates, and are supposed to distribute the remaining money in an estate according to a decedent’s will.

These administrators have come under public scrutiny, and even been fired, and yet some retain guardianships and conservatorships.

Attorney General Dana Nessel and former AG Bill Schuette terminated a handful of public administrators following media reports of questionable attorneys fees and assets not being turned over to rightful heirs. But despite being fired, the same former administrators retained an unknown number of guardianship and conservatorship cases.

Schuette in 2017 fired Oakland County public administrators Barbara Andruccioli and Jon Munger; former Macomb County public administrator Cecil St. Pierre resigned after being suspended. Nessel in 2019 fired administrators Jennifer Carney, Thomas Fraser and John Yun, also of Oakland County, as well as Robert Kirk, a public administrator in Macomb County.

John Munger has no active cases in Oakland County, but Jennifer Carney has 415 open or adjudicated cases, Thomas Fraser has 560 open or adjudicated cases and John Yun has 577 open or adjudicated cases, court records show.

An Oakland County Probate Court representative defined an adjudicated case as a case in which a judge has ruled, sometimes adding a co-guardian or discharging one guardian and replacing them with another, though the case may still come before the court for further rulings.

In many and perhaps even most of the above cases, Carney, Yun and Fraser may no longer have an active role, though data on the court’s website is inexact and all three are listed on the county’s Professional Guardian List.

Katharyn Barron, appointed in 2019 as Michigan’s public administrator, said she didn’t view this as a problem.

“Just because we removed them from their job as county public admin, that had nothing to do with their role as a guardian or conservator for individuals,” Barron said. “The court appoints them not because they’re the county public admin, but because they’re a private attorney.”

Andruccioli in 2018 was hired as Oakland County’s probate register and continues in that role today.

Meanwhile, there are also some 1,600 people under guardianship in Michigan with no immediate relatives. These cases all default to the Attorney General, who, by law, is the last person of interest in a case when there is no one else.

Under Nessel, it is Barron’s duty as state public administrator to blow the whistle on any questionable reports or annual accountings submitted by her wards’ guardians and conservators.

An unknown number of these are filed in undigitized courts across the state and are labor-intensive to track.

Barron is also the chair of Nessel’s Elder Abuse Task Force, where she coordinates a committee of more than 100 officials, lawyers, elder advocates and politicians, seeking to improve life for the state’s elderly.

Still, Barron said she checks on “each and every one” of these 1,600 cases, something she’s been able to accomplish with the help of remote court hearings, her office manager and a contracted law student.

Failures of reform

Elected Michigan officials have been trying to fix guardianship for decades, though each attempt has yielded little real change.

Murmurings of guardianship abuse in Michigan emerged in 1996. The Associated Press reported on the for-profit businesses of Alan May, a Wayne County professional guardian, and on guardians across the state with self-dealing arrangements between nursing homes and conservators.

Since then, elected officials established committee after committee to study the issue. For example, in 1996, the State Supreme Court convened a task force on guardianship reform. They produced 11 recommendations, including that “minimum ethical standards for professional guardians and professional conservators should be promulgated and enforced.”

Three years after those reforms were instituted, a 2003 report from the Office of the Auditor General showed problems in the probate courts. Auditors took a sampling of cases from Washtenaw, Wayne, Huron, Calhoun and Jackson counties. In one court, the auditors found 44 out of 114 annual accountings filed by conservators should not have been approved.

“For example, in 1 case a conservator reported annual expenditures of $37,198, but documented expenditures of only $27,717. In another case, a conservator reported nursing home expenditures of $15,558 but provided documentation supporting only $4,740,” the audit states.

In 2005, then-Governor Jennifer Granholm established another task force. This one also recommended minimum standards for guardians. The task force warned that “incidence of elder abuse is likely to rise significantly” over the next 20 years,” owing to Michigan’s aging population.

The recommendations led to no new legislation. When state auditors returned in 2012, they found the state court administrators had only complied with a few of the recommendations made in 2003.

Again, auditors recommended more oversight. And again, SCAO officials agreed.

The office would revamp its use of SCAO 65, officials promised, which would help probate courts identify conservators and guardians with “repeated deficiencies.”

This was the same form that, under the administration of Milton Mack, was “streamlined” to exclude names entirely – making it useless in terms of identifying specific bad actors.

In 2019, Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the creation of the latest Elder Abuse Task Force. Since its inception more than 100 members — judges, lawyers, guardians, advocates, accountants – have met monthly via Zoom. Reforming guardianships, conservatorships and court practices is one of the task force’s goals.

Chief among them was the idea that guardians should be certified — effectively licensed – by an agency such as Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. LARA already oversees licenses of professions from nursing, medicine, child care and even barbers.

Reformers have urged lawmakers to pass a certification requirement since the 1990s, which would mandate education, training, background checks and insurance bonding for guardians and conservators.

Salli Pung, the state’s long-term care ombudsman, chairs the task force’s subcommittee on certification, something which is already a requirement in 14 U.S. states.

“If we’re going to require certification for a dog groomer, we should be requiring it for people who are responsible for every aspect of someone’s life,” Pung said.

Only two of Nessel’s task force’s many initiatives have so far been accomplished. Banks must now report fraud of vulnerable adults and there’s a new form for law enforcement to use when reporting that fraud.

The fate of the other seven — including certification – is tied to proposed legislation stalled in the House Judiciary Committee since June 2021.

Members of the task force said the proposed legislation has elicited objections from trade groups representing judges and guardians.

Judge John Tomlinson, president of the Probate Judges Association, said the initial package would slow the court’s ability to deal with emergent guardianship cases. “PJA couldn’t approve the first package of bills,” Tomlinson said.

The Michigan Guardianship Association also publicly opposed the package, including certification requirements that would require regular visits and limits on the number of wards a guardian can accept. The organization has spent $18,000 per year in lobbying expenses.

MGA representative Georgia Callis in March agreed to an interview with Record-Eagle reporters, canceled a scheduled interview, then stopped responding to requests to reschedule.

Guardians and judges have traditionally opposed oversight measures, such as capping how many wards can be assigned to one guardian.

If there’s money in a person’s estate, a guardian makes $83 per month, or about $1,000 per year. To make minimum wage, a professional guardian would need at least 20 wards.

Mack and Tomlinson said many shoot for 30 or more, on the assumption that some cases will be managed pro bono.

Judges have expressed concern over whether “capping” would leave thousands of vulnerable people in Michigan unguarded. According to Milton Mack, it’s very likely that the first wards to be dropped would be those being served pro-bono.

Mack said he was worried that, by regulating guardians, the new task force might actually end up leaving hundreds of vulnerable adults out to dry.

Legislation proposed by the task force is now in its third revision, and has been modified significantly.

If passed, the new law no longer would “cap” the number of wards a guardian can be appointed to serve, for example. Other changes have also been edited out of the initial bills, including requirements for guardians to personally visit their wards.

Several members of Granholm’s 2006 task force described their previous efforts as fruitless, in part because of pushback from guardians and judges.

“I don’t remember that there was a lot of change. I think I would have celebrated it if there was,” said Sharon L. Gire, a task force member and former director of Michigan’s Office of Services to the Aging.

“And there certainly were professionals in the field – attorneys who make a living – who were very concerned about not having too much control over what they do,” Gire said.

Barron vowed Nessel’s task force won’t have similarly insubstantial results.

“We’re not a task force that is going to write a report and then pat ourselves on the back and ride off into the sunset,” Barron said. “We’re not report-writers. We’re initiative accomplishers.”

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who was also on the 2006 task force, said she’s skeptical.

“That’s what they said the last time. That’s not what happened. The task force met, we had some very good discussion, it was a very comprehensive report, and then literally nothing happened,” said Worthy.

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Michigan’s guardianship system leaves vulnerable exposed