As a community, we look to long-term care facilities, such as assisted living centers and nursing homes, to help take care of our aging and vulnerable citizens in a gentle, caring and respectful manner, honoring their long lives and many experiences.
Certainly, that’s what we would have wanted for Grace Watanabe, a 98-year-old Japanese American survivor of the World War II Japanese internment camps and a longtime public servant who spent years working for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and saved much of her salary for her retirement.
Workers accepted money
As Ms. Watanabe became frail and needed more care, she moved to Symphony Residences of Lincoln Park believing the facility would protect and care for her. Her siblings had died, and she had no family, so Watanabe became increasingly reliant on Symphony, paying them more than $3,600 a month for her care.
In addition to these fees, during Watanabe’s time at Symphony, seven workers received more than $700,000 from her. The workers say the money was given to them as gifts.
In October, two of those workers, Tameeka Wolfe, the nursing home’s business manager, and Christina Wright, its activity director, were arrested and charged with one felony count each of financial exploitation of an elderly person for having allegedly stolen $136,900 and $205,197 respectively from Watanabe. Prosecutors say the women wrote themselves checks from Watanabe’s bank account without her permission and when Watanabe did not have the cognitive capacity to consent.
My office is Grace Watanabe’s court-appointed guardian. We stepped in when this situation was discovered and removed her from Symphony, moving her into another facility with our oversight and took immediate steps to protect her remaining savings. Full justice for Watanabe requires both that the perpetrators be brought to justice criminally and that we recover her money, which we’re seeking through a civil lawsuit we filed against Symphony, its parent corporations, and employees.
Contempt of court
As we have moved forward with the suit, Symphony has stalled and delayed at every opportunity, scheduling witness depositions and then cancelling them multiple times. In a hearing on Sept. 20, Judge Aicha MacCarthy found Symphony in contempt of court and ordered them fined every day until they complied with the order to produce four individuals for deposition. Symphony has appealed the order.
Justice delayed in this case is, indeed, justice denied: Watanabe is 98 years old.
While we seek justice for Watanabe and others, we see the limitations of using the criminal and civil court systems to deal with these cases. Time is of the essence and these are slow, deliberative processes.
Scams and exploitation
There are millions more elderly U.S. residents whose life savings or retirement funds are at risk right now: older people lose as much as $36 billion every year through scams and financial exploitation.
Because legal remedies are so difficult to pursue and so slow in coming, we must focus on how we can stop this from happening and how we can better protect vulnerable people like Grace Watanabe.
One way would be to set up an alert system when large or frequent sums of money are withdrawn from accounts or unusual charges occur on a credit line. Banks and financial management companies already do this when the amount is more than $10,000 or by request for any amount; it would not be difficult to set up similar alerts for elderly account holders without treading on their self-sufficiency.
Lowering alert amounts and intensively marketing the alert programs would be a service to all, especially older adults.
With that in mind, Wall Street’s self-regulatory agency FINRA is telling stockbrokers to encourage account holders to list a trusted person who can be alerted if financial activity on their account signals a potential scam. Banks do not currently offer this program; we can and should lobby Illinois banks to start doing so.
We at the Public Guardian’s office work hard to protect those in our care; we manage about $100 million in assets belonging to people under guardianship. Over the past ten years we have recovered more than $50 million in assets that were stolen from them before they had the protections of a guardian. Still, we cannot protect the millions of seniors outside our care. Banks and financial institutions can certainly do more to protect their most vulnerable customers and clients.
Bans on “gifts”
Another important tool is for Illinois to require nursing homes, assisted living centers and long-term care facilities to implement bans on financial “gifts” to employees and enforce them. Under corporate policy, the seven workers at Symphony who took Ms. Watanabe’s money were not supposed to accept gifts from residents — but Symphony’s administration did not actively enforce that rule. They fired the workers after the fact, but that didn’t prevent Watanabe’s money from going with them.
By training workers not to accept financial gifts and enforcing that ban with “clawback” procedures requiring the money be returned, nursing-homes and assisted-living-facilities would create an additional layer of protection for their residents.
With the aging of the Baby Boomers, we will soon have the largest number of senior citizens in our country’s history. We know that seniors are increasingly targeted by financial predators, and every dollar lost can endanger their survival. We want our vulnerable elderly to be well cared for in their sunset years, not abused.
We must step up now at the city, county and state level and demand that lawmakers and financial institutions shield other Grace Watanabes from scams and swindlers.
Charles P. Golbert is the Cook County Public Guardian.
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