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Guardians For Profit

The Los Angeles Times is running a terrifying series this week on the insane way California regulates conservators.

Conservators are professionals who manage the affairs of incompetent persons, be they elders who have health problems like Alzheimer's disease or younger people who have mental impairment or illness. For example, if your elderly grandmother can no longer remember to pay her bills or begins to donate large sums to predatory 'charities,' a court can step in and appoint someone to take care of her financial and living arrangements. Sometimes the appointee is a relative. If no relative can or will assist, the court will appoint one of these professional conservators.

California's conservatorship laws are mostly non-existent. Anyone who pays a $385 fee and has no felony convictions can be a professional conservator in that state. These minimum qualifications are set to increase next year -- unfortunately, too late for the thousands of Californians who have lost literally everything they own to incompetent and/or criminal conservators.

The Times reviewed thousands of California conservatorship records, including the work of every professional conservator in southern California from 1997 to 2003. They found egregious violations of both law and simple human dignity, including:

  • running up fees, small and large -- in one case a conservator charged a woman $150 to have an employee bring her $49 of groceries, while a different conservator charged another woman's estate $1,700 for simply attending the burial;

  • isolating wards from loved ones and friends -- one conservator moved a woman into a nursing home and refused to tell her daughter where she was for more than a month, and another withheld a disabled man's allowance, forcing him to rely on handouts from a local church;

  • moving with incredible speed to take control of seniors' assets -- one man didn't even know he had been made a ward of a conservator until he had his credit card declined at a restaurant where he'd eaten lunch; and

  • worst of all, plundering a ward's savings for personal gain, including at least one instance of a conservator selling a woman's home at a discount -- to herself, only to later have the conservator's daughter resell the home for triple the price.

    If you live in California or have elderly relatives that do, you can't afford not to read this series. I'm not shocked by many things anymore, but reading about one conservator who tricked a clearly competent woman into signing her life away is real-life horror. The courts, who are supposed to be watchdogs and prevent this kind of abuse, are overworked and apathetic. Most of the abusive conservators are able to get control of a person's affairs with emergency interventions that take mere minutes, days or weeks before the court can even conduct its mandatory investigation. And once the conservator has that control, it's nearly impossible to remove him or her because the ward's own money is used to fund the conservator's fight to keep oversight.

    If you don't live in California, read the series anyway, then find out how your state regulates conservators. Sooner or later this issue will affect all of us, in one form or another. We can't afford to stay on the sidelines while the people designated to protect us steal our lives instead. It's a real-life nightmare no one deserves to have.

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