Inside The Senior Alliance: Attorney General Dana Nessel Discusses Her Elder Abuse Task Force (Ep 1.31)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
In this episode, Jason Maciejewski, CEO of The Senior Alliance, talks with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. They talk about the role of the Attorney General in Michigan and how her office connects with Seniors on important issues. They also discuss the Elder Abuse Task Force that Attorney General Nessel created, how Michigan law enforcement agencies are able to use the guidelines that the Task Force has provided, and how banks and credit unions are using the Elder Abuse Task Force guidelines on preventing financial exploitation. They also discuss how to identify and report suspicions of elder abuse in the community and what steps Seniors can take to prevent becoming a victim of fraud or financial exploitation. Extremely important information!
Produced by The Senior Alliance and Blazing Kiss Media
Transcription
Jason Maciejewski (00:00):
Welcome to Inside The Senior Alliance, a podcast exploring resources and issues in the field of aging. I’m Jason Maciejewski, CEO at the Senior Alliance, the Area Agency on Aging serving Western and Southern Wayne County. Joining me today is Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, Attorney General. Welcome to the podcast.
Dana Nessel (00:15):
Well, thank you so much for having me.
Jason Maciejewski (00:17):
So I want to jump right in here. First to ask you what the job of the State’s Attorney General is. It’s a pretty wide scope. I think people see a lot of information and see the Attorney General involved in a lot of different things. But specifically, what is your role in state government?
Dana Nessel (00:33):
Well, the Michigan Attorney General is the state’s top lawyer and also top law enforcement official. So I’m responsible for overseeing close to 600 lawyers, investigators, and support staff in this role. We’re considered to be the biggest law firm in the state of Michigan, and my office is responsible for conducting both civil and criminal investigations and prosecutions. And we also assist local prosecutors in law enforcement when it’s needed or when they request it. And we also represent the state before the appellate courts in Michigan and also federally. So, you know, we argue in the sixth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court, and we serve as legal counsel to state officers and most of the state agencies, boards, and commissions and also I provide options and questions of law when asked to do so. So if there’s an opinion that’s needed from the governor or a member of the legislature or a state officer, you know, we review contracts involving the state. We manage programs to protect consumers against exploitation and illegal activity. It really runs the gamut. But, you know, we are also very proactive at the state. And so not only do I represent and defend the state, but I represent all 10 million plus residents who live in our state and do proactive work on their behalf. And that is, especially when it comes into play when it involves protecting consumers and protecting seniors.
Jason Maciejewski (02:00):
Speaking of being proactive, how does the job of Attorney General connect to older adults specifically?
Dana Nessel (02:06):
Well, an incredibly important part of my job is protecting Michigan residents from fraud and from other criminal activity, and in particular, protecting our most vulnerable residents from that type of activity. And what we know is, unfortunately, older adults are often specifically targeted by bad actors. And so that alone makes them more vulnerable to exploitation. And there’s a lot of different reasons for that, partially because older adults have spent their entire lives saving up and having, frankly, more resources to steal from. And it’s also because older adults are perceived to be more vulnerable, easier to steal from than younger adults, and they’re more vulnerable to scams simply because more people are going to try to steal from them. So as the [inaudible] lawyer and law enforcement official, we receive complaints from citizens throughout the state about issues of concern relating to the criminal courts, probate courts, and then allows me to consider what aspects of our legal system are just not working well for Michigan residents and offer proposals through partnering with Michigan legislators for statewide change.
Jason Maciejewski (03:10):
So in 2019, very quickly after you were elected to your first term, you created an elder abuse task force, which consisted of more than a hundred individuals from 55 different organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. And you had a goal of combating elder abuse. What motivated you to create this task force and what are your goals for it?
Dana Nessel (03:31):
So when I was campaigning initially back in 2018, you know, I went all around the state of Michigan and the compliance, I heard really no matter what area of the state I was in, no matter what region, no matter what sort of what demographic I was I was speaking to, I just heard over and over again issues that involved seniors and just massive problems, systemic problems that we had and how we could do so much better than we were doing in the state. So, you know, we put this task force together really just as soon as I took office in 2019. And what I wanted to do was this, we have had previous task forces that had existed in Michigan history, but what they did more than anything was just compile information so that we could find out what the problems were involving elder abuse. And I didn’t just want to replicate what those previous task forces had done. I wanted a problem solving task force so we knew what the problems were, but we wanted a task force that would actually take action and actually implement change. And that is what we’ve tried to do.
Jason Maciejewski (04:32):
You did a lot of hearings around that. I know you came to the down river area and to our service area and did a hearing on that with a task force, which was a great event. We had a lot of people attend that one and ask a lot of great questions. But what’s come out of that are nine initiatives that have been identified by the Elder Abuse Task Force. And the first one is the Vulnerable Adult Incident report. Could you tell us what that is and how it’s being used by law enforcement and Adult Protective services?
Dana Nessel (04:58):
Sure. Well, we started with nine initiatives and now we’ve actually had sort of three slates of initiatives as the years have gone on. But we have just a number of different things that we want to be able to accomplish on behalf of seniors. And, you know, some of these have been legislative initiatives and then others have to do more with the process or education. So the standard vulnerable adult incident report form was created back in 2019. It was created for use by law enforcement when they’re conducting a vulnerable adult abuse investigation where there’s, you know, neglect or there’s exploitation or again abusive seniors or they’re people who need help. So it’s really a one page front and back form that an officer can take with them to the scene of an investigation and they use it as a checklist to ensure that they’re collecting the most important information that’s needed for the investigation.
Dana Nessel (05:48):
And that’s a particularly important tool for officers who are new recruits or officers who just haven’t had the opportunity to receive much training about conducting investigations regarding abuse of an older adult or a vulnerable adult. And what we were finding, frankly, it’s not as though you had police officers that didn’t care about seniors. They just sometimes didn’t know the right questions to ask and then to obtain that information to give to the local prosecutor. So there’s a section that helps officers determine if a victim is a vulnerable adult by representing really a checklist of activities of daily living to consider whether that person can complete these activities. And there’s a section to consider whether physical risk of harm is present and a section to consider whether financial risk of harm is present. So the forms available on the Department of Attorney General’s website, and you can find it actually by going to the main page for Elder Abuse Task Force. And there’s a PDF that’s there under resources. But what I’m so excited about is that we didn’t have to get a law passed to get law enforcement to include this so that each and every law enforcement agency, whether you’re talking about state police or county sheriffs or municipal police departments, we didn’t have to make them use this form. They all voluntarily adopted it. And they did that right away in 2019. So now every single law enforcement agency in the state actually utilizes that form.
Jason Maciejewski (07:09):
It’s a wonderful, tangible result of the work of the Elder abuse task force. And it had quite an impact so far. Something else that’s come out of the work of the task force is actually a law public Act 344 of 2020, which is the Financial Exploitation Prevention Act. And that requires reporting by banks and credit unions. How does this tool combat fraud and financial exploitation?
Dana Nessel (07:30):
Yeah, I thank you for asking about this. The Financial Exploitation Prevention Act, or FEPA as we call it, you know, it was a culmination of more than two years of work on the part of the task force and its members, and we’re so proud of it and we think it’s so impactful. So the legislation was passed in December, 2020. It went into effect in September, 2021. And what it does is it provides substantial protection for seniors and their financial resources. And I just can’t even tell you the stories, the tragic stories I heard over and over again about, you know, it was the same thing over and over. It was a senior who had fallen victim to a scam, the kind of scams that any of us, any of us should so easily fall for. Right? Whether it’s a phone call that comes into you or a knock on your door or an email or a text message, and you provide some financial information thinking that this is somebody different than whoever they present themselves to be, and boom, right away, sometimes you see somebody try to transfer all of the assets that a person has spent their entire life accruing.
Dana Nessel (08:30):
So we wanted to do something to address this. So one important provision in FEPA it allows financial institutions to delay transactions that they think might be exploitive. And so if you have an unusual transaction, and I’m not talking about the regular stuff that you’ll see on a bank account for a person every month, right? Like you might have an individual every single month, they make a payment that’s around the same amount to DTE or to Consumers or, you know they pay $500 or a $1,000 for a credit card and that’s their consistent usage, but then all of a sudden out of nowhere, boom, there’s an electronic transfer of $50,000 from their bank account that’s really out of the ordinary of what you’d normally see. Well, it requires that there be a delay in terms of allowing that transaction to move forward until, or unless you have a report made to law enforcement or to APS and there has to be some sort of confirmation that that person really intended that transaction.
Dana Nessel (09:32):
So we’re saving people from losing all their money and people also require guardians and conservators to be court-certified. And it increases guardians, generally speaking, allows for a system of checks and balances that we put into place to make sure that seniors just aren’t losing their entire life savings. So we’re excited about it. We think that it’s worked really well. And I will tell you for my own family, my parents, not once but twice, my parents are both in their eighties have fallen victim to scams and had to have holds put on transactions where they would’ve lost almost everything that they had in their bank account. Fortunately, they didn’t because of this very law.
Jason Maciejewski (10:15):
And we hear these stories all the time of financial abuse and exploitation, and this is an important piece to combating that. So good result out of the task force. There are other initiatives that the other abuse task force had discussed and worked on. Could you maybe highlight some of those?
Dana Nessel (10:31):
Sure. So we have a number of other initiatives that are legislative in nature. And this is one of the challenges of the task force is that we can put together what we think are some of the very best new bills that would substantially better protect seniors and their assets. But we got to get the legislature to act, right? And in the last four years, that’s been a challenge and we’ve had some progress, but not enough to get many of these other initiatives through. I think we finally had the bandwidth to do it now with this new legislative term and the new folks that we have in the legislature. So we have a package that is moving forward and a lot of it involves guardianships and conservatorships. We have a bill that would require a court to make a findings of fact of a person with priority for an appointment of guardianship like a family member has passed over in favor of a party with lower priorities.
Dana Nessel (11:25):
So for instance, let’s say that a person says, well, something happens to me. I want my son or my daughter to be my guardian. Well, you know, we see situations in court all the time where the judge will say, I see that’s what you want, but I’m going to instead appoint a professional guardian, somebody who is a complete stranger to you and not who you wanted, which was a family member. Well, the court has to act, behave a little bit differently. And if they’re going to choose somebody who is not the person that the individual wanted, they have to be very specific as to why. We’d also require certification of guardians and conservators and then includes requirements for a minimum amount of training and professional standards. I can never understand why professional guardians did not have to be certified. I mean, you have to be certified to be a barber in this state.
Dana Nessel (12:19):
You have to be certified to sell Christmas trees in Michigan, but not when you have total control over an individual’s life. You get to make all their financial decisions in their place and all of their medical decisions, and you don’t even have to have any training or a background check. That’s crazy, right? So that’s why we believe that professional guardians should have to be certified. Also, we want to increase guardian’s visitation requirements because, you know, as it is right now, it’s just once every three months. We want to make it monthly at least if it’s done virtually, so that you know, the person’s consistently checking in on this protected person. We have another initiative that would refine the process for emergency petitions for guardianships and conservatorships so that we’re promoting an individual’s due process rights and ensuring that guardians are only appointed when we have no less restrictive alternative that exist.
Dana Nessel (13:11):
You know, some people don’t need full guardians over them, they just need a little help. Sometimes people just need some help paying their bills or they just need help obtaining their medication. They don’t need somebody making all of their decisions for them. We’re also recommending legislation that would clarify and expand the guardian ad litems responsibilities so that we’re ensuring that this, the individual appointed by the court to provide information both to the protected person and about the illegal proceedings to them and to the court about the individual’s circumstances and their wishes that they spend adequate time meeting prior with that person. And they provide the court with a standardized thorough and objective report about it. And finally, we believe it’s imperative that we improve protections for wards protected people when professional guardians seek to remove them from their homes. And that includes requiring prior consultation with that protected person and consideration of other supports and services that would require them to remain in their home.
Dana Nessel (14:11):
You know, we feel as though taking somebody out of their home and putting them into a nursing home. I mean, sometimes there’s no other option, right? But if there is another option, we have to explore that option first. You know, people want to age in place, they want to stay in their homes, and we want to make sure that they’re given every opportunity to be able to do that. And that moving them out of their homes, selling their homes, moving them to a nursing home that that is a last resort not the first move that you would make.
Jason Maciejewski (14:41):
And that’s certainly a value that we have at the Senior Alliance and working with people to remain living in the community and the homes where they want to be. There’s many great initiatives in those things you just highlighted. We look forward to advocating on them as they move through the legislative process, hopefully in the near future. But let’s turn to the signs of elder abuse maybe a little bit more specifically. How can an older adult or a caregiver identify a situation of abuse that might be occurring?
Dana Nessel (15:05):
Well, you know, there’s just so many physical, emotional and financial signs of abuse that people can watch out for in their communities. Say a senior suddenly has a change in their spending pattern or unpaid bills that they had never neglected in the past. But all of a sudden, you know, bill, after bill remains unpaid, there could be a sudden change in sleeping patterns or sudden weight loss, sometimes unexplained injuries. Or you might have somebody who’s missing medical appointments or appears fearful when they’re speaking with outsiders. So we’ve set up resources for residents to call and to report suspected abuse as well as to learn about, you know, other signs of abuse. So I’d like to encourage residents who’d like to learn more to visit our website, michigan.gov/elderabuse, or you can call us at 1-800-24-ABUSE for more information. Or if you or someone you know, suspects abuse is happening, you can call and you can report it to your local authorities.
Dana Nessel (16:03):
And we also have, you know, that hotline 855-444-3911. And I just want to say this, if you suspect that something weird is going on with a senior in your community, you know, it just doesn’t hurt to make that report. And if there really is nothing going on, great, but at least it allows for law enforcement or APS just to check up on that person just to make sure everything’s okay. And to me, I would just err on the side of concern when you identify any of those signs or anything else that just seems off or different or odd about a circumstance involving a senior.
Jason Maciejewski (16:42):
Great. Thank you for sharing that information as well about how people can report abuse. Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
Dana Nessel (16:48):
I will say this, you know, we could be just doing so much better here in Michigan and I just would really urge all of your listeners to contact their state representative, to contact their state senator and to urge them to pass these legislative initiatives that are coming forward from the Elder Abuse Task Force. You know, the thing is we worked so hard to put together a task force that was bipartisan, that involved both the chambers of the legislature and, you know, these are best practices and the practices that are used in other states around the country that are really working. We can’t expect a different result if we don’t make a change in the law. And I’ve had now four years of trying to get some of these laws passed. The ones that we have passed have been enormously impactful and effective. So I just ask people to call up their state government representatives and to tell them, please pass these laws. We need better protections for seniors in this state.
Jason Maciejewski (17:50):
There you go. That sounds like a charge for advocacy to me. Attorney General Nessel, thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the Senior Alliance.
Dana Nessel (17:57):
Thank you so much for having me.
Jason Maciejewski (17:58):
If you have any questions about services or programs The Senior Alliance offers, you can call us at 1-800-815-1112 or email us at info@thesenioralliance.org. Information about our agency or the programs and services we offer can found on our website at www.thesenioralliance.org. On Facebook, we can be located by searching for the Senior Alliance. And finally, our Twitter handle is @AAA1C. I’m Jason Maciejewski. Thank you for listening to this episode of Inside the Senior Alliance.
Inside the Senior Alliance is a production of the Senior Alliance and Blazing Kiss Media.