Who guards the guardian? The accountability gap at the center of American guardianship

Two weeks ago, two inspectors from the state authority responsible for authorizing and inspecting professional guardians in my region spent a full day in my office. It was a routine inspection, the kind French law requires for every professional guardian: the authority that licenses us is also required to inspect us, on a recurring schedule, whether or not anyone has complained. The inspection concluded with a favorable report and a certificate of compliance from the authority. The day itself was only the visible part. The inspection had begun a month earlier, with a request for documents that allowed them to check my cases with the courts concerned before they ever walked in. On the day, they opened case files at random and read them through, from the court order to the latest bank statement, and checked that each protected person had received the notice of rights and when. They asked for my written procedures, all of them, and had me send the full set afterward. They examined the premises: the locked cabinets, the fire safety equipment, where originals were kept and who else could reach them. They tested my compliance with European data protection law, from the register of processing to the encryption of the case management system and the deletion rules for closed files, and asked for the system's technical documentation. They read my contract with my accountant to find the confidentiality clause, my insurance, my licence, my complaint register and my continuity plan in case I was incapacitated myself. Above all, they went through the money: the bank statements of the protected persons, account by account, the movements on each, and the annual accounts of management I file for every person I protect, checked against those statements and against the supporting documents for the expenses. It took me two days to prepare and a day to sit through, and I would not trade it: every file I could open was a file that no one could later claim I had hidden.

For many of the estimated 1.3 million Americans under guardianship or conservatorship, nothing resembling that kind of whole‑practice inspection is built into routine oversight. In the United States, the guardian is the one person in the system who holds the keys to everything, the money, the housing, the medical decisions, the mail. Across much of the country, routine oversight still depends heavily on reports prepared by the guardian himself, with the depth of independent review varying sharply by state and court.

The cases that made the news. The failures are well known because, periodically, one becomes a scandal. In Florida, Rebecca Fierle built the largest guardianship practice in the state, more than 750 wards at its peak, until a man under her care died in 2019 after she signed a do‑not‑resuscitate order that hospital staff said he had not wanted; in July 2023 she pleaded no contest to neglect of an elderly person and received four years' probation. In Nevada, April Parks ran a private guardianship business that drained the estates of the people she was appointed to protect; in 2019 she was sentenced to sixteen to forty years. In New Mexico, the owners of Ayudando Guardians embezzled roughly eleven million dollars from clients, many of them veterans and disabled adults, and went to federal prison. These are not isolated personalities. The Government Accountability Office, examining twenty closed cases across fifteen states and the District of Columbia, found that guardians had stolen or improperly obtained 5.4 million dollars from 158 incapacitated people, many of them elderly. In the same investigation, GAO applied for guardianship certification in four states using fictitious identities, one with 30,000 dollars of debt, a repossessed car and a credit score of 528, another using the Social Security number of a dead person. All four applications succeeded. No one checked.

What the latest data say. The problem is not a lack of rules. Most states require guardians to file an inventory and an annual accounting. The problem is what happens to those documents afterward. Florida, which reformed its system after the Fierle case, offers the most recent picture. In October 2025 the state legislature's research office found 6,478 active professional guardianship cases in the state's new data transparency system, but could link only 56 percent of them to an identifiable guardian, because the system has no unique identifier for guardians. For 35 percent of active cases, there were no records at all on whether the guardian had complied with reporting duties. Seven percent of identified guardians carried thirty or more cases; one carried 275; and 40 percent of wards were served by guardians carrying more than thirty cases at the same time. The state received 136 complaints about professional guardians in 2024, of which 83 were found legally sufficient, yet the statewide database showed documented disciplinary history for only eleven of 566 actively registered guardians, a figure the research office itself cautioned was likely an undercount. Its first recommendation was modest and telling: give each guardian a unique number, so that the state can at least count them.

Minnesota is the exception that measures the rule. Since 2011, its courts have run a Conservator Account Auditing Program: conservators file their accounts online, and a team of ten auditors reviews them, with an average of eight hours per audit. In 2015 the program covered about 4,600 conservatorship cases and 720 million dollars in assets. Of the accountings audited between January and October 2016, 17 percent were clean. Forty‑eight percent had minor issues, 23 percent had multiple issues without identified loss, and 12 percent reached the highest concern level, involving possible loss, improper expenditures, loans, commingling, or other serious financial irregularities. Put differently: when a state actually read the accountings it was already receiving, five out of six had something wrong with them, and one in eight raised a serious financial concern. A decade later, few states have matched the program, and reform advocates say they have had little success persuading them to.

What accountability looks like when it is built in. France professionalized court‑appointed guardianship nearly twenty years ago, and the structure is instructive precisely because it is ordinary. A professional guardian must hold a national certificate, obtained through several hundred hours of training; be licensed by the state after the public prosecutor's opinion; carry liability insurance; file an annual account with supporting documents for every protected person, which is checked by the court clerk's office or, for large estates, by an independent professional; and submit the whole practice, not just one file, to state inspection. If the guardian dies or is incapacitated, a written continuity procedure says who takes over and how. The system is far from perfect: caseloads are too high, verification is uneven from one court to another, and the routine inspection I described does not come every year. But the four layers exist, at entry, per case, per practice, and at exit, and each is performed by someone other than the guardian.

The United States does not need French law to build those layers, and could not import it if it wanted to; guardianship is state law and will remain so. What can cross the Atlantic is narrower: the principle that a fiduciary's self‑report is the beginning of oversight, not the end of it, and a handful of mechanisms that make the principle operational.

A unique identifier for every guardian, as Florida's own analysts asked for, so that caseloads can be counted and complaints followed across cases. A licensing gate that checks credit and criminal history, which GAO showed to be missing in four states fifteen years ago and which several states have since added. Audits of annual accountings by sampling, Minnesota's model, funded by court fees and staffed by people who read bank statements for a living. Caseload limits that are enforced rather than recommended. And something that remains rare in the United States: a periodic review of a professional guardian's entire practice, procedures and files together, by an authority that can suspend the license.

Why the honest guardian should want this. It is tempting to read accountability as suspicion. In my experience it is the opposite. The guardian who documents by structure, dates every decision, keeps supporting documents for every expense and can show a reviewer, on request, how a protected person's money moved during the year, is the guardian who is protected when a relative arrives, after the fact, with a well‑told story. Structured documentation protects the vulnerable adult first. It protects the fiduciary second, and the institution third. The LAPA framework's documentation discipline, the dated logs, the synthesis sheet that ties each measure to the risk it addresses, the annual report of management, grew out of a system in which being looked at is normal. It is designed to make being looked at easy.

A guardian who has nothing to hide loses nothing from being examined. The one who does is the reason the examination has to exist. A system that chooses not to look is not trusting its guardians. It is trusting its luck, and the people who pay when the luck runs out are the ones who could not choose their guardian in the first place.