(Quebec) The Public Curator does not sufficiently protect incapacitated persons under private tutorship against financial abuse and mismanagement, deplores the public 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 vulnerable”, which details his investigation into the Curateur public and its practices of monitoring private guardianships.
In Quebec, there are more than 33,000 incapacitated adults under protection. 9,400 adults have a private guardian, ie a close person designated to act on their behalf.
Mr Down and his team conclude that the watchdog of society’s most vulnerable, in the “presence of financial abuse or mismanagement by some guardians”, “sometimes takes too long to react, does not consistently 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 Presswhich revealed last year that the workload of the Curateur’s employees was “stultifying”, but that some employees subjected private curators to administrative hassles.
Trip 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 is also to demonstrate 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 put forward 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 of “safety” 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.