Madam, – The report on the survey of elder abuse in Ireland is very welcome, and particularly for highlighting that financial elder abuse is the most common form of elder abuse (Home News, November 9th). This should be a call to arms for urgent Government action for a financial sector that is not only unprepared for the problem of financial elder abuse, but which has resisted facing up to this problem for a decade.
As chairman of the government’s working group on elder abuse from 1998-2002, producing the report Protecting Our Future, we had assumed that the professionalism of bankers would entail their sector keeping up to speed with international developments on financial elder abuse. States and banks in parts of Australasia and the US have been developing policies, procedures and guidelines for the prevention, detection and management of elder abuse, as well as training staff, from tellers, through managers, to policymakers. For example, accounts can (with permission of the account holder) trigger alerts on unusual spending, and managers can have better procedures for dealing with the “friend” who comes in with a vulnerable client with a view to cleaning out their bank account.
A public awareness of the existence of these procedures is a potent disincentive to potential abusers.
Sadly, when chairing the government group for implementing the report, it became increasingly clear that this assumption was optimistic at best, and naive at worst. It was obvious that the health and social sector “got it” (although this should not promote complacency, and the network of senior case workers needs to be preserved during the present turmoil). However, the feedback from the case workers, the reports of the financial ombudsman and cases appearing in the Irish courts meant that we saw involvement of the financial sector as the emerging priority.
To our chagrin, our repeated requests for inclusion of a senior civil servant from the Department of Finance on what was supposed to be a government committee were repeatedly turned down, and the group was disbanded without any sense of involvement of the banking, credit union, insurance and financial services sector. Indeed, the Department of Social Protection, a major payer of pensions and benefits, has no detectable policies, procedures, guidelines or systematic training for the prevention, detection and management of elder abuse.
This new report reminds us that is absolutely critical that elder abuse is not seen purely as a “health and social care” issue, but a societal one, and one where banks, credit unions, the insurance and financial services sector, as well as the Departments of Finance and Social Protection, recognise their responsibility and capabilities to prevent, detect and manage financial elder abuse.
Recent training of bank staff by the Dublin Mid-Leinster Elder Abuse Steering Group is a start, but is far from the system-wide and radical reform that the sector needs to initiate to ensure that we can age with confidence and that our chances of suffering the misery of financial elder abuse will be minimised by a banking and financial sector that understands the new realities of ageing. – Yours, etc,