New Bill Would Fund States' Efforts to Protect Older Investors

by Melanie Waddell

What You Need to Know

• The SEC would implement the grant program.
• Bill provides $10 million in grants annually to state regulators to help investigate and prosecute senior financial fraud cases.
• The bill is endorsed by AARP, Americans for Financial Reform, CFP Board and the Financial Services Institute.

Senators introduced Thursday the Empowering States to Protect Seniors from Bad Actors Act, bipartisan legislation to create a grant program, implemented by the Securities and Exchange Commission, that would work closely with state securities regulators to protect older investors.

The bill, introduced by Sens. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Tim Scott, R-S.C., Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., “will provide $10 million in grants annually to state regulators to support the investigation and prosecution of senior financial fraud cases, invest in technology and training, and conduct outreach to older Americans and increase their awareness of scams,” the senators said.

The bill was previously introduced in the House by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and passed out of the Financial Services Committee by voice vote in November.

The senators cite a report from the Senate Special Committee on Aging, released during the last Congress, which found that older Americans lose approximately $3 billion each year to financial scams and abuse. “A separate survey from the Investor Protection Trust found that approximately seven million Americans have reported being victims of financial exploitation,” the senators said.

The bill is endorsed by AARP, Americans for Financial Reform, Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Inc., Consumer Federation of America, CFA Institute, Financial Services Institute, Insured Retirement Institute, National Association of Insurance Commissioners, North American Securities Administrators Association, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors and the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors.

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New Bill Would Fund States' Efforts to Protect Older Investors

New bill would put Florida nursing home residents at risk | Opinion

Michael Brevda

by Michael Brevda

A recently proposed bill would greatly reduce nursing care from Florida’s nursing homes. Crazy right? Removing the nursing out of nursing homes.

SB 804, proposed by Sen. Ben Albritton (R- Wauchula), would reduce the 3.6-hour nursing care requirement to one hour. In Florida’s nursing homes, nurses serve as the captain of the ship. Other staff members look to nurses for guidance and direction. Removing the most trained and highest educated member of the care team will have disastrous consequences. This is akin to removing the surgeon from the operating room.

SB 804 would further slash basic Certified Nursing Assistant care mandates. Instead of the minimal 2.5 hours of CNA care (which is already lower than other states), Albritton’s bill would allow nursing home facilities to provide what is called 2.5 hours of “direct care,” instead.

Glaringly, “direct care” can be provided by non-nursing employees, like the activities staff. This too is dangerous since non-clinical staff members qualify as “direct care” givers, yet they lack the training and experience needed to care for such a vulnerable patient population. A similar bill was proposed earlier this year which allowed “PCA’s” with a mere eight  hours of training to replace Certified Nursing Assistants.

Reducing nurse interaction with residents, and allowing untrained, non-clinical staff to replace care givers is a formula for disaster. If this bill becomes law, this state-sanctioned understaffing will lead to bed sores, falls, and medication mistakes.

Albritton’s proposed legislation also softens the punishment on facilities that do not have adequate staff numbers.

Currently, nursing homes that fail to meet the staffing requirements for two consecutive days are banned from accepting new residents. This makes sense, because if you do not have the staff needed to care for the existing residents, you should not be allowed to take in new residents.

The ban is only lifted once the nursing home can meet the bare minimum staffing requirements for a six-day period. If SB 804 is made law, understaffed nursing homes would still be allowed to admit new residents, if they pay a small fine.

The AARP has come out publicly against this dangerous deregulation on nursing home staff numbers. AARP Florida State Director Jeff Johnson told Florida Politics Wednesday the bill all but removes the “nursing” requirement from Florida’s nursing homes. The AARP has formally opposed the proposed reduction in care.

The for-profit sector of Florida nursing homes has historically been understaffed and focused on its profits, not patient care. By slashing staff requirements and softening penalties for bad behavior, we are encouraging an industry plagued by poor performance to continue to harm and neglect residents.

This is entirely unacceptable. We must demand better from the corporations that care for Florida’s aging seniors.

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New bill would put Florida nursing home residents at risk | Opinion

Daughter of artist Peter Max says guardianship has cost her father $16 million

Guardians Aren't Above Prosecution Act introduced

 

By: Adam Walser

 

ST PETERSBURG, Fla. — U.S. Representative Charlie Crist (D-FL) announced the introduction of his new bill, the Guardians Aren’t Above Prosecution Act, during a virtual press conference Wednesday.

Crist said the legislation shines a light on the lack of judicial action commonly taken against bad actors who abuse and defraud vulnerable persons within a guardianship or conservatorship and spurs prosecution against those bad actors.

“It’s shameful that some of our most vulnerable Americans in conservatorships or guardianships have so few safeguards to protect them from malicious fraudsters,” Crist said. “It’s simply unacceptable.”

He believes prosecuting guardians who break the law will send a message that exploitation and theft by guardians and their attorneys will no longer be tolerated.

“It’s the kind of thing that’s going to help an awful lot of people get their dignity back and get their lives restored to a place that it should have always been,” Crist said, noting there have been many recent cases of guardianship abuse in the Tampa Bay area in recent years.

Over the past eight years, ABC Action News has been exposing those problems through our award-winning series The Price of Protection.

Crist said the bill has bipartisan support and will allow guardians who commit fraud or abuse to be prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department.

Joining him for the announcement were guardianship reform advocates, including an attorney involved in the "Free Britney" movement and the daughter of world-famous pop artist Peter Max.

Max is a German immigrant who became famous in the 1960s for his colorful pop art. His contemporary paintings have been featured on U.S. postage stamps, have been displayed in the White House and are on display in museums throughout the world.

Max now suffers from dementia. He was put into guardianship in 2016 after a court ruled he was abused by his second wife Mary, who committed suicide in 2019.

His daughter Libra said she has been fighting to have him freed from guardianship for the past several years. She said guardians and attorneys have so far spent more than $16 million of her dad's fortune.

Max said there are currently two guardians, a court-ordered attorney and three additional attorneys who are working to prevent her father’s release from guardianship.

“As a family, we’ve been fighting six attorneys who are actively using my father’s hard-earned money to fight against his own family to keep him isolated, which is not what he wants. If any other citizen was doing this to an elder, they would be criminally prosecuted,” Max said at the press conference.

She hopes the new law will help create criminal penalties that will enable families to hold predatory guardians accountable.

“My father’s civil liberties and human rights are being egregiously violated and his life has been stolen from him. We desperately need legislation like the GAAP Act so that crimes committed by guardians can be fully prosecuted under federal criminal law,” Libra Max said.

Crist previously introduced the Freedom and Right to Emancipate from Exploitation (FREE) Act with Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-SC) and the Guardianship Accountability Act with Reps. Darren Soto (D-FL), Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), Debbie Dingell (D-MI), and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA).

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Daughter of artist Peter Max says guardianship has cost her father $16 million 

 

See Also: 

Free Peter Max: a daughter’s fight to remove her dad from the clutches of ‘predatory’ guardianship 

 

Guardianship forces pop art legend Peter Max to live as shut-in, pals say: Devine

 

Family of ailing artist Peter Max hopes to get him out of guardianship

New bill aims to curtail elder financial abuse

Two senators introduced bipartisan legislation Thursday that aims to cut down on elder abuse by encouraging advisers and the financial institutions they work for to report potential financial fraud targeting American seniors.

The Senior$afe Act of 2015 is sponsored by Senators Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., the chairwoman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

The Act would protect banks, credit unions, investment advisers and broker-dealers and their employees from civil or administrative liability, as long as employees receive training in how to spot and report predatory activity and reports are made “in good faith” and “with reasonable care,” according to the bill.

Current bank privacy laws make it difficult for these entities to report any potentially fraudulent activity, according to a news release from Ms. Collins. Indeed, only one in 44 cases of financial abuse is ever reported, according to the National Adult Protective Services Association.

The MetLife Mature Market Institute estimates annual financial loss of $2.9 billion due to elder financial abuse.

The legislation “will empower and encourage our financial service representatives to identify warning signs of common scams and help stop financial fraud targeting our seniors,” Ms. Collins said.

It's based on Maine's Senior$afe program, an initiative launched last year that's designed to train financial professionals to detect and report senior financial abuse.

In a letter to Sens. Collins and McCaskill, Judith Shaw, Maine's securities administrator and president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, commended the proposed legislation.

The bill will “[remove] barriers that might otherwise frustrate the reporting of such exploitation to state securities regulators and other appropriate governmental authorities,” Ms. Shaw said.

"Elderly Americans stand to benefit directly from such reporting, because early detection and reporting can minimize their financial losses from exploitation, and because improved protection of their finances ultimately helps preserve their financial independence and their personal autonomy," Ms. Shaw said.

The proposed legislation also comes on the heels of activity among industry groups and regulators to strengthen financial protections for seniors.

Last month, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc.'s board authorized the regulator to propose a rule to help protect senior investors by requiring broker-dealers to obtain the name and contact information of a trusted person for customers' accounts. It would also allow firms to freeze senior investors' accounts when there's reasonable belief of financial fraud.

NASAA also last month proposed model state legislation that would mandate disclosures to state regulators and adult protective services if there's reasonable belief of elder financial abuse. Rules also would allow brokers and advisers to contact trusted third parties or delay fund disbursement for seemingly at-risk seniors. The comment period for the proposed NASAA rule ended Thursday.

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New bill aims to curtail elder financial abuse