Conservatorship Accountability Project

The Need for Court Reform

Effectively monitoring guardianship and conservator cases is challenging for many courts. The problems are pervasive:

• Guardianships are often granted with too much ease.
• Guardians and conservators are often not certified and may receive little training.
• Courts lack resources and staff for effective oversight.
• Courts manage increasingly complex caseloads with limited budgets.
• Courts often lack effective case management systems to track guardianships and conservatorships.

About the Project

The purposes of the Conservatorship Accountability Project (CAP)[1] [2], were to modernize conservatorship accounting and tracking processes and build safeguards to protect vulnerable adults from financial exploitation.

Specifically, CAP strove to advance tools to help courts:

1. develop and use technology to automate key functions of the conservatorship process;
2. increase monitoring of specific cases based on analytically derived risk indicators;
3. Provide courts with conservatorships data standards; and
4. collect information on current court monitoring practices.

Data collection efforts showed that not only do most state courts lack the capacity to develop and implement broad-scale changes, but antiquated systems create struggles with even simple tasks, such as documenting the number of active conservatorship cases and tracking compliance with reporting requirements.

Without this data, technology solutions and targeted reform cannot be applied.

Understanding these limitations, the CAP has produced two reports to help courts:

Regardless of the current situation within a state, the proposed strategies can be adapted to assist all courts.

Modernization, including advances in technology, is the broad theme that can drive meaningful reform.

In the CAP project, two modernization components were studied:

1) the ability to replicate Minnesota’s online accounting system, MyMnConservator, in other states, and

2) implementing empirically based red-flags to identify cases with a concern of financial loss using Minnesota’s data.

THE "MINNESOTA MODEL: "MyMNConservator (MMC)”

In Minnesota, conservators are required to submit an inventory to establish the assets and estate of the protected person. They are required to use mandatory conservatorship accounting software—MyMnConservator (MMC) to file the inventory, as well as annual accountings reporting each transaction, online. There are features in MMC that help balance accounts with bank statements and track categories of spending.

A centralized, statewide Conservator Account Auditing Program (CAAP) is utilized to audit first annual accounts and then every four years. Centralized court staff review annual accounts in between audit years. Automation in MMC places the accountings in the applicable queue for audit by CAAP or review by staff reviewers. Accounts can be referred to audits from court staff, reviewers, and judges. Auditors draft an audit report to the court summarizing audit findings and recommendations (see Appendix B, Modernizing Conservatorship Guide for more information on audit levels).

The local court has the discretion to call for a judicial hearing when necessary to address the audit report. In cases where there is a documented loss due to conservator behavior or unethical actions, the most common judicial responses are removing the conservator and ordering repayment of funds. An analysis of judicial responses to conservator exploitation in Minnesota can be found in this background brief.

Reform Efforts in the Pilot States & Lessons Learned

Five pilot sites embarked on the CAP project in 2016 to improve court monitoring and implement auditing solutions. The states were Indiana, Iowa, Texas, Nevada, and New Mexico, each with different resources and different stages of reform. Competing priorities and resource constraints proved too challenging for simply implementing software solutions like Minnesota’s MMC. Nevertheless, great strides were made in improving the conservatorship process. Summaries of the successes and lessons learned are detailed in the guide. Highlights include:

Development and Testing of “Red Flags”

CAP aimed to develop, test, and validate a set of empirically-based “red flags” that are indicative of financial mismanagement or exploitation of the assets of adults placed under a conservatorship. This was accomplished through statistical analyses of the Minnesota data (hundreds of variables, thousands of data points).

Ten preliminary risk indicators were discovered that could predict the need for a top-level audit in Minnesota, including vehicle, clothing, dining out, hobby and grocery expenses, round transactions, and the number of bank accounts.

However, when applied to new cases, these risk indicators were not able to statistically differentiate the need for a top-level audit from the other levels. Therefore, the 10 indicators were not recommended to be programmed into MMC or other state systems. Multiple reasons exist for why NCSC was unsuccessful in operationalizing empirically-based red flags, however, CAP supports further work in this area. Applying banking industry techniques and machine learning to predict financial behavior in conservatorship cases is the future of reform.

SEVEN STEPS FOR MODERNIZATION

[1] “Conservatorship” refers to the guardianship of the estate wherein the conservator is lawfully vested with the power and charged with the duty of taking care of the property of another person who is considered by the court as incapable of managing his or her own affairs (State Court Guide to Statistical Reporting, Version 2.1, updated October 9, 2015).

[2] This project is supported by State Justice Institute Award No. SJI-15-P-237, Conservatorship Accountability Project: Modernizing Conservatorship Processes and Improving the Protection of Assets. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this publication/program/exhibition are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the State Justice Institute.