A Social Security “representative payee” program that allows a third party to handle and cash checks on behalf of those elderly people who aren’t able to do it themselves, continues to have the potential to result in unchecked nursing home abuse in California, a report in CentreDaily.com says.

The anxiety about misuse of the program goes back to a case of elder abuse two decades ago when Dorothea Puente, a Scaramento boarding house owner, exploited residents at her unlicensed facility, milking them of their Social Security check payments, and physically abusing and killing several of them. The abuse, which sent shockwaves through the assisted care industry at the time it was discovered, went unnoticed for much of the eighties.

In the early part of the decade, Puente started her boarding home, a mom-and-pop version of a professionally-run assisted care facility. A boarding house can provide residents with food and shelter, but is not involved in providing medical care to residents. These boarding houses too are required to be licensed by the state, and local ordinances may call for separate registration. Puente’s boarding house had neither state nor local licensing.

The reasons for not applying for a license were easy to see. Puente had a previous record of convictions for theft and check forgery, including grand theft of a Social Security check. She had served three years in prison as a result of those convictions. With a record like that, Puente knew she would never be able to obtain a license, and she opened, and continued to operate her boarding house, under the radar of the law.

Puente’s abuse and misappropriation only came to light when a social worker checking up on a client, that she had admitted into Puente’s boarding house, couldn’t trace him. The police were called in, and began digging up the yard of the house. They found the bodies of four woman and three men. Investigations would later reveal that there were two other victims. Puente was sentenced to life without parole, and an appeal earlier this year was turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

That incident of the most horrific kind of nursing home abuse was exposed back in 1988, but as some experts warn, the potential for misuse of Social Security checks by third parties, as Puente accomplished with such ease and for so long, is still present. States like California, where state inspections of nursing homes have decreased in recent years, are especially at risk. California recently enacted budget cuts that included snipping away funds for the Ombudsman Program, an important part of nursing home inspections. We can expect the quality and frequency of inspections to go down even further now, making the possibility of more cases like Puente’s, a not too distant possibility.

According to experts, it’s still far too easy for third parties to exploit the elderly and the helpless, who are incapable of handling their own finances. The lack of inspections that allowed Puente to get away with some of the most horrific kinds of elder abuse two decades ago, is still a reality, and it looks like nursing home abuse lawyers won’t have to wait long until the next Puente-style abuse story is enacted.

The Reeves Law Group is a law firm with offices throughout California dedicated exclusively to the representation of personal injury victims, including victims of nursing home abuse. Please visit our website at trlglaw.com. If you desire a free consultation on a personal injury matter, please call us at (800) 644-8000 or email us.