(Quebec) The Curateur public does not sufficiently protect incapacitated persons under private tutorship against financial abuse and mismanagement, deplores the Québec Ombudsman, who blames an overflow of bureaucracy, a lack of personnel and a computer system obsolete.
“The sooner we intervene, the better we are able to put an end to the abuse. In several cases where the Curateur public has been slow to intervene, well, the tutor has gone bankrupt, the person represented has died,” lamented protector Marc-André Dowd at a press conference on Thursday.
He presented his report Under guardianship, but still vulnerablewhich details its investigation into the Curateur public and its monitoring practices for private tutorships.
In Quebec, there are more than 33,000 incapacitated adults under protection. A total of 9,400 adults have a private guardian, ie a close person designated to act on their behalf.
Mr. Dowd and his team conclude that the watchdog of society’s most vulnerable, in the “presence of financial abuse or mismanagement by certain guardians”, “sometimes takes too long to react, does not systematically take action necessary and does not always carry out sufficient follow-up”.
The Curator’s bureaucracy can be improved, but it is “obvious” that an “excessive workload”, the “staff shortage” and the “obsolete computer system” are also responsible for these failures, he notes. -he.
It thus echoes surveys by The Presswho revealed last year that the workload of Curator employees was “mind-numbing”1but that employees were subjecting private trustees to administrative hassle2.
Travel to the South paid for by an incapacitated person
“If we wait several months, let’s say, well, the tutor who is in bad faith or who is abusive, he can continue his abuse during this period, on the one hand. And, on the other hand, it has also been shown that it is more difficult to recover the money after, for example, a few years or several months. It’s difficult,” Mr. Dowd explained.
He gave several examples. In one case, a tutor had lent $60,000 from the patrimony of an incapacitated person, and multiplied “suspicious transactions”. “In total, 15 years passed before the Public Curator was appointed guardian,” reveals Mr. Dowd.
Another troubling case: a person under guardianship received an inheritance of $200,000 in 2012. However, the Curator waited until January 2014, “a little over six months after receiving the annual management account”, to make a request for “security” of the property. “The person depicted and other family members had gone abroad for the winter, with the money of the person under protection”. In 2022, the Curator “was still evaluating its remedies with a view to recovering certain sums”. Total abuse is assessed at $105,000.
Sometimes delays accumulate. In one case, a review of an annual management account took 268 days. In the other, the Curator took 14 months to communicate a recommendation. And despite the fact that he detected a “possible financial abuse” in a file submitted in 2018, he still had not “decided” during the Protector’s investigation. “The complexity of the file and numerous staff movements partly explain the non-compliance with deadlines,” the document reads.
For its part, the Curator stated in a press release that it shared the findings of the Québec Ombudsman, and that it had already implemented an action plan to remedy these shortcomings. “Some measures have already been taken, in particular the addition of private representation staff, while others are being developed. Let us cite, for example, the creation of a web portal for exchanges to facilitate and modernize communications with legal representatives,” the organization explained.