A Handbook for the System as It Wishes to Be Seen

The full essay is here as a PDF.

A Handbook for the System as It Wishes to Be Seen

Reading Pennsylvania’s Guardian Handbook against the grain

Pennsylvania’s Office of Elder Justice in the Courts has published a Guardian Handbook, and I want to say plainly: it is one of the better documents of its kind. The National Guardianship Association’s Bill of Rights is reproduced in full. Least-restrictive alternatives are urged repeatedly. Guardians are told, correctly, that they must petition to limit or end the guardianship if the person’s capacity improves. Reporting requirements cannot be waived. Conscientious judges and staff built this, and a conscientious family guardian who reads it will do better by the person in their care.

And yet. The most important things about this handbook are the things it does not say. Its silences map, with uncomfortable precision, onto the mechanisms by which guardianship becomes — in too many documented cases — state-endorsed, white-collar crime.

Begin with the elder abuse chapter. It catalogs abuse by caregivers, facility staff, scammers, even self-neglect — every category of perpetrator except the one this handbook is addressed to. Abuse and financial exploitation by guardians themselves, the risk the system’s own Guardian Alert mechanism exists to flag, appears only as a glossary definition. The guardian is cast exclusively as the sentinel watching everyone else. A monitoring regime that cannot name its central risk cannot manage it.

The silence is not for want of Pennsylvania examples. Three months before the handbook appeared, Gloria Byars — a Delaware County guardian who, with her co-conspirators, stole well over one million dollars from at least 120 incapacitated people — pleaded guilty in federal court in Philadelphia to conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, and tax fraud. Pennsylvania courts had appointed her to guardianships eventually covering more than a hundred people; her undisclosed Virginia convictions for financial fraud and forgery lay outside the reach of a state-only records check. The government’s own account of the case names the defect plainly: first as an office manager for a Delaware County guardianship company and then as a guardian in her own right, Byars had “unfettered access” to the bank accounts, pensions, real estate, and retirement accounts of the people under those guardianships. The word is not the prosecutor’s alone. Testifying to the House Aging and Older Adult Services Committee in 2021, Judge Lois Murphy — now chair of the Supreme Court’s Advisory Council on Elder Justice in the Courts — told legislators that a guardian of the estate is granted “essentially unfettered authority” over the person’s assets and income. Authority and custody in one set of hands, with no one appointed to check either.

Nor was her appointment one county’s lapse: when the Government Accountability Office tested state guardian-certification programs with fictitious applicants, every state it tried granted credentials — including to an applicant with ruined credit and the Social Security number of a dead man. 

Second, consider who has been written out. The criminologist Nils Christie warned that legal systems expropriate conflicts from the people who own them. Here the expropriation is complete. Before the hearing, family, friends, and neighbors may appear as petitioners. After the Final Decree, they are recast as “interested parties” — defined in the glossary, remarkably, as entities “legally entitled to receive notification of the filing of guardian reports.” The people best positioned to notice trouble — the concerned persons — are reduced to recipients of paperwork. The handbook describes no pathway for them: no guidance for raising a concern about a guardian, no description of a review request from their side, no acknowledgment that the person who noticed may be the very person the guardian has frozen out.

The people the handbook does not address are not hypothetical. Testifying at the same 2021 hearing, Pamela Walz of Community Legal Services described who comes to her: people adjudicated incapacitated who are seeking restoration of their rights, and people whose guardian is not attending to their needs, or even returning their phone calls. Both would open the Guardian Handbook and find it addressed to someone else.

Criminology has a name for what that collapse produces: routine activity theory, Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson’s insight that exploitation occurs when a motivated offender meets a suitable target in the absence of a capable guardian — meaning not a court appointee but the watchful presence, the family member or friend or neighbor whose nearness makes exploitation less likely. The handbook’s architecture removes that presence by design, leaving a person the court has certified as vulnerable alone with whomever the court has appointed. The system installs a guardian and dismisses the guardianship — a conflation of two different protective logics, one juridical, one relational, that I take up fully in Capable Guardians, in the Justifying Justice series.

The demotion is stranger still under Act 61 of 2023: since June 2024, a Pennsylvania court may not appoint a guardian where a less restrictive alternative suffices, and must make specific findings on the availability of “family, friends and other supports to assist the individual in making decisions” before ordering guardianship. The supporters the statute makes decisive at the threshold are the ones the handbook retires at the decree.

The gap has since widened. Act 39 of 2025, effective in December of that year, struck the provision leaving review hearings to the court’s discretion — a hearing “at any time it shall direct” — and replaced it with a schedule: on an interested person’s petition to terminate or modify, the court must set a review hearing within thirty days and hold it within sixty, continuances permitted only on written findings. If the court finds that guardianship is no longer necessary or that a less restrictive alternative exists, it shall discharge the guardianship. The legislature gave the concerned person a clock. The handbook gives them a mailing list. 

The provision is not unqualified. Where the same interested person has had a hearing within the past 180 days and the new petition raises no new issues or facts, the court may decline to schedule another for 180 days. Read as a guard against vexatious refiling, that is sound court administration. Read from the position of the person who noticed — who may be raising the same concern precisely because nothing has changed — it is a door that closes for half a year at a time. Either way, it is a limit the handbook does not mention, because the handbook does not mention the door. 

Third, look at how the court actually monitors. The instrument is the guardian’s own annual self-report. The tracking system’s automated flags are triggered “based on the data provided on the report” — that is, by what the guardian chooses to disclose. Supporting documents are required only at the court’s discretion. There is no independent verification, no court visitor, no audit. The system generates compliance data, not outcome data. This is why the numbers are missing: we cannot count what we have built no instrument to detect.

A review function does exist. Testifying in 2021, Judge Emil Giordano — then acting chair of the Supreme Court’s Statewide Orphans’ Court Rules Committee — told the committee that registers of wills across the Commonwealth were doing their best to assign someone to the annual filings — a new assignment, he said, set upon them without appropriate funding. The check is real. What it checks is the guardian’s own account of the guardian’s own conduct, reviewed by an office given the duty and not the means.

Financial regulators have at least begun to name this defect. When a brokerage suspects exploitation and freezes a disbursement, the question becomes who verifies the concern — and too often the answer is the fiduciary whose conduct prompted the freeze. Compliance professionals call this a failure of control design: authority and verification are different functions, and collapsing them into one set of hands defeats the control. Guardianship monitoring is built on that very collapse — and, unlike a brokerage hold, it runs for life.

Fourth, notice the asymmetry of scaffolding. The handbook supplies checklists for new guardians, budget worksheets, bank inquiry forms, a visitation checklist. For restoration of rights — the outcome the law claims to prefer — there is no checklist, no worksheet, no phone number. What a system provides forms for is what it expects to produce.

Finally, the economics are invisible. Guardian fees, attorney fees, bond premiums — all paid from the estate of the person under guardianship — pass in glancing references. A reader would never learn that guardianship is, among other things, a market in which the protected person’s life savings are the revenue source, and the customer cannot leave.

None of this requires bad faith from the handbook’s authors. That is the point. Systems of lawful but awful harm do not need villains at the drafting table; they need only documents that mistake procedure for protection and address safety advice to the party who holds the power.

A second edition could fix this. Name guardian-perpetrated abuse and tell readers where to report it. Give interested parties a chapter of their own — how to raise concerns, how to petition for review under § 5512.2(a.1) and what Act 39’s thirty- and sixty-day deadlines mean in practice, what standing they have, and how supported decision-making, which § 5512.1 makes courts prefer, can operate within an existing guardianship, not only before one. Publish a restoration checklist beside the appointment checklist. Disclose the fees. 

Pennsylvania has produced a good handbook for the system as it wishes to be seen. The people under guardianship deserve a handbook for the system as it is.

Sources

Act of Dec. 14, 2023, P.L. 446, No. 61 (Act 61), amending 20 Pa. C.S. §§ 5511–5512.1. https://www.palegis.us/statutes/unconsolidated/law-information?SessYr=2023&ActNum=0061.&plPageNum=0446

Act of Oct. 27, 2025, P.L. 129, No. 39 (Act 39), amending 20 Pa. C.S. § 5512.2(a.1). https://www.palegis.us/statutes/unconsolidated/law-information?sessYr=2025&sessInd=0&actNum=39

Christie, N. (1977). Conflicts as property. British Journal of Criminology, 17(1), 1–15. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23636088

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus Felson. (1979). Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach. American Sociological Review 44, no. 4, 588–608. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2094589

Office of Elder Justice in the Courts. (2024). Pennsylvania Guardian Handbook. Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts. https://www.pacourts.us/Storage/media/pdfs/20240213/150943-guardianshiphandbook.pdf

Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Aging and Older Adult Services Committee, public hearing on guardianship (HB 1356, HB 1890, HB 1928), Harrisburg, Oct. 26, 2021 (testimony of Hon. Lois E. Murphy; Hon. Emil Giordano, ret.; Pamela Walz, Esq.). https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/TR/Transcripts/2021_0160T.pdf

Shaw, J. (2018, March 30). She went to prison for fraud and bad checks. Then courts around Philly let her manage the finances for elderly residents. The Philadelphia Inquirer. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/gloria-byars-guardian-philadelphia-orphans-court-frisby-berg-20180330.html

U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. (2023, November 16). Pennsylvania guardian Gloria Byars & her co-conspirator found guilty of stealing from elderly wards [Press release]. https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/pennsylvania-guardian-gloria-byars-her-co-conspirator-found-guilty-stealing-elderly

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2010). Guardianships: Cases of financial exploitation, neglect, and abuse of seniors (GAO-10-1046). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-10-1046

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