State agrees to fast track investigations of elder abuse

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In December, there was a waiting list of as many as 300 complaints with Adult Protective Services that were more than 60 days old and had yet to be assigned to an investigator.

Under state statute, the investigations must be conducted within 48 hours of receipt of the initial report of abuse, neglect or exploitation.

Vermont Legal Aid, the Community of Vermont Elders and Disability Rights Vermont filed a formal complaint with the Department of Disabilities, Aging, and Independent Living, the agency that oversees Adult Protective Services in December.

On Tuesday, the Department agreed to a set of corrective actions, many of which have been under way since February.

The state has agreed to hire full-time temporary and permanent staff to clear backlog by Oct. 1. Five employees have been retained so far, to eliminate the long list of pending investigations.

Barbara Prine, senior attorney for Vermont Legal Aid, is cautiously optimistic that the Shumlin administration is turning around what had become an intractable issue as a result of state workforce cuts under the Douglas administration.

“There have been longstanding problems,” Prine said. “The funding cuts and the hiring freezes only made things worse. This has happened across state government. Some parts are OK; some are limping; and this part was broken.”

State government is supposed to help protect people, Prine said. Over the last few years, that protection has waned as the state cut jobs during the depths of the Great Recession. About 10 percent of the state workforce has been eliminated.

“Under the Douglas administration, there were good people in the department, but they were not able to get the resources they needed to turn this around,” Prine said. “I believe they cared, but at some point you have to say what the Shumlin administration said, which is we’re going to put more staff here.”

Prine pointed out several particularly dramatic cases legal aid was asked to address. In one instance, a woman with a developmental disability had been sexually assaulted. In another, a man with a traumatic brain injury was financially exploited. “He was meeting his daily needs in the beginning, but over time, this guy went from having a pretty good job to having no food in the house,” Prine said. “His situation went from something that could wait to something that couldn’t.”

It’s fairly common for relatives and friends to take advantage of a loved one who is incapacitated, according to Susan Wehry, the commissioner of the Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living.

“More often than not the alleged perpetrator is a family member, and it’s not stranger exploitation,” Wehry said.

Prine said Gov. Peter Shumlin and Doug Racine, secretary of the Agency of Human Resources, met with advocates in December and decided to invest more resources into Adult Protective Services, in order to clear the backlog of cases. The department hired five full-time, experienced investigators to probe the complaints.

Wehry said addressing this said the state had 498 cases under active investigation from January to May 15.

There are now about 75 backlog cases that have been been waiting since before Feb. 18, and 159 in a queue that have been waiting for less than 15 weeks.