(This article first appeared in Broad and Liberty)
The incumbent treasurer of Chester County has twice been accused of fleecing elderly persons she was in charge of protecting during her career as a professional guardian. In another instance, attorneys she was working with in a guardianship accused her of nonpayment.
Those accusations, combined with previous Broad + Liberty reporting — revealing Patricia Maisano received her master’s and doctorate from a diploma mill, and that she was removed from court cases after failing to meet standards as an expert witness — raise serious questions about her integrity and fitness for office.
Maisano, once a Republican who later turned Democrat, was first elected as treasurer of Chester County in the fall of 2017. With the switch of her party affiliation already in hand by then, she belonged to a handful of Democrats swept into office that fall whose elections began to foreshadow the tidal shift in the Philadelphia suburbs away from a century of Republican dominance.
Her time as treasurer is uncontroversial. But it is her professional work that has left a trail of embittered and disillusioned people in her wake.
The case of Betty Winstanley
Elizabeth “Betty” Winstanley and her husband Robert, were well into their retirement years when they moved into an independent living facility in Lancaster County in 2008. But, their idyllic retirement came crashing down in 2014.
Betty, 92 at the time, was using a rolling walker one day and felt faint, and decided to sit on the floor until she felt restored. But she says staff at the facility claimed she had a fall, something that can trigger an avalanche of precautions. Close to the same time, Robert became ill and died that summer.
Because of the disputed “fall,” staff at the retirement home labeled her as a resident that could no longer live independently. After Robert’s passing, one of Betty’s two sons asked a court to appoint a guardian for her.
For the unfamiliar, an elderly guardianship “is a legal relationship created when a court appoints a person to care for an older adult. It happens when the adult can no longer care for themselves,” according to the website FindLaw.com.
“Unfortunately, there may come a time when an elderly parent or loved one can no longer take care of themselves or make important decisions. Illness, injury, or aging can all change a person’s decision-making abilities,” the site explains.
Elderly guardianships are a necessary tool in society, but they’re also open to abuse. For example, in 2019, the Delaware County district attorney filed charges against three guardians with bilking over 100 seniors out of $1 million. One of the accused, Gloria Byars, took her own life on the day of her sentencing.
Betty’s struggle to free herself from guardianship was complicated by the fact that there was discord among her children. One son wanted Betty under the care of a guardian while two other siblings, a son and daughter, did not. Her first guardian was removed just over a year into his stewardship over Betty. When he was replaced, the court appointed Patricia Maisano as her guardian in December 2015.
Betty’s other son, David, who didn’t want her in a guardianship, says he vividly remembers that shift in power.
“My sister and I, my attorney from Philadelphia, [we] thought that it would be best that when [Maisano] was appointed the new guardian that we go and meet with her. So we went to her office in Pennsylvania and she was just very arrogant.” David recalled to Broad + Liberty. “She said, ‘From now on, I am your mother.’ That’s a quote. My sister can back that up as well.”
The controversy caught the eye of journalist Diane Dimond, who chronicled the alleged overbilling.
“During the first three months guardian Maisano was in charge of Winstanley’s life, she billed $50,599.18 for services rendered,” Dimond wrote in her deeply researched and sourced book on guardianship, “We’re Here to Help: When Guardianship Goes Wrong.”
Dimond highlighted some of the more eye-popping billings, “including two phone calls the guardian listed as having been made to one of Betty’s children to discuss ‘dates for [a] Christmas visit.’ For those two calls, the estate was charged a total of $1,560,” Dimond wrote.
“After Betty was rushed to the hospital with an unknown health problem, the guardian’s logs show that she made no calls to any Winstanley offspring to inform them of their mother’s setback. Three days later, the guardian noted making a couple of calls to Betty to see how she was doing. Maisano calculated that the time she devoted to those communications was worth $990,” Dimond also noted.
“Then there was a $1,000 bill incurred because, as Maisano noted, her ‘computer emails appear[ed] to be breached…[and] extensive work [was] done on my phone and computer as a result.’ The charge included time spent calling her IT department and a consulting attorney. There was no written explanation as to why Mrs. Winstanley should have been billed for technical or legal assistance on Maisano’s devices, which were surely used for more than just keeping track of her estate,” Dimond pointed out.
David said he and his sister, who were hoping to move Betty to Maryland to be closer to them, felt powerless.
“[Maisano] called herself a guardian. She could make court testimony on mental capacity,” David told Broad + Liberty. “She had all kinds of supposed degrees. And my private eye that I had hired said that these were purchased, these were bought degrees. She didn’t attend universities to get any professional schooling such as neuropsychology or anything like that where she could accurately make a determination.”
In two years of reporting on her, Maisano has never responded to requests for comment from this outlet about her bogus masters and doctorate degrees. Efforts to verify her nursing degree, a degree that forms the very basis of all other elements of her career, have been inconclusive. Broad + Liberty raised other issues about the resume Maisano has published online.
For example, she claims she has worked as a “national patient coordinator” at “Crossroads Head Injury Center” in Pittsburgh, but Broad + Liberty cannot find that any such center ever existed. In-depth internet searches as well as inquiries to a small number of long-time healthcare providers in that area have not turned up any evidence of a head injury center by that name.
As explosive as the findings about Maisano’s billing practices were, Dimond also had a personal experience so remarkable it’s still etched in her memory.
Dimond says Maisano tried to take away Winstanley’s phone in retaliation for talking to her, a reporter.
Then one day, she went to a court hearing for Winstanley in Lancaster County.
“I walked into that hearing as if I belonged. No one stopped me,” Dimond recalls. “I sat back in the upper back row and all of a sudden it became clear that Patricia Maisano realized I was there, and her attorney stood up and said to the court, ‘Your Honor, this person needs to leave. Diane Dimond is sitting there.’”
Although only a single anecdote, it’s still a powerful representation of the difficulty elderly wards have in being able to recruit and use advocates while already being committed to the power of another person.
“There’s no reason to close this hearing,” Dimond recalls. “But nonetheless, I was kicked out. I was escorted out by a security guard and told never to come back again.”
The Starr report
Maisano’s conduct in other guardianships has also raised red flags.
In 2007, Maisano became the court-appointed guardian of a disabled Delaware woman. Details of the case are limited because many of the relevant court documents are not accessible.
But a source who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation was able to provide two documents from the case: a fact-finding report by attorney Kristopher Starr, completed and submitted to the court in January, 2009, as well as a follow-up report that reviewed Starr’s work.
The “Starr report” is unsparing in its frank assessment against Maisano, who was operating under her corporate name, IKOR.
“IKOR, for their part, egregiously overbills. There is no way to soften, sugar coat, or otherwise explain this finding,” Starr wrote. “[A] thorough review of twenty-one (21) IKOR invoices from February 2007 through November 2008 evidenced disturbing billing trends and tens of thousands of dollars in overbilled amounts.”
A few pages later, Starr continued his prosecution of what he described as “disquieting” and “pervasive overbilling.”
“When data evidences that each phone call, whether a voice mail, a simple discussion, call to a creditor, etc., was at least 25 minutes per call, it becomes incumbent upon IKOR to justify such a rate,” Starr explained.
“IKOR billed almost one hour for each letter sent. Check writing, and bill review was over 30 minutes per event. IKOR billed an average of 20 minutes to type an email. IKOR required an average of 21 minutes to put a fax in a machine, type in a number and hit ‘send,’” Starr continued.
In his conclusions, Starr said he concluded “that IKOR engaged in a pattern of significant and systematic overbilling…such that the disabled person was egregiously overcharged for professional guardianship services rendered by IKOR.”
He then recommended that the court “[r]educe IKOR’s outstanding bill, payable in the amount of $104,127.32 from [the disabled person’s] funds, by $46,987.86,” — a reduction of 45 percent.
“More troubling is that the overbilling is from a sophisticated and knowledgeable professional guardianship agency who regularly is appointed to cases by this Court,” Starr wrote.
Starr was not the only legal professional alarmed by what he saw from Maisano and IKOR.
Another attorney, Richard Kiger, was tasked with reviewing Starr’s work. Kiger used some of Maisano’s billing for sending faxes as an example.
“Ten faxes were sent,” he noted in one example. “It took IKOR 396 minutes, or 6.6 hours, to prepare a fax sheet from a template and to fax about 30 pieces of paper to nine creditors. The charge to [the ward] for all this comes to $462.00.”
“As one who has used a fax machine probably thousands of times by now, it is hard for me to believe that it takes more than a minute or two to fax a two page letter,” Kiger wrote later. “An estimate of 18 to 24 minutes to fax that letter is insulting as well as an arrogant grab at the funds of someone who in many cases will be powerless to protest and is fully dependent upon others for advocacy. The situation is that much more offensive when there is a print-out showing that the 18 or 24 minute procedure actually took 1 or 2 minutes.”
Fourteen pages into his analysis, Kiger said, “I have to agree with Mr. Starr’s assessment” that IKOR systematically overbilled, and he likewise recommended IKOR’s payment be cut by tens of thousands of dollars.
From the Kiger report, it’s also easy to infer that Maisano, acting as IKOR, filed a motion to strike the Starr report. That motion apparently claimed Starr was aiming to sabotage IKOR because the wife of one of Starr’s law partners also was a guardian, and eliminating Maisano would be good for the friend.
Kiger was not having it.
“The charges made in the motion to strike are very serious. If they do not amount to defamation, per se, they approach it. They are based on insinuation and supposition, but no scintilla of evidence has been presented that misconduct of any kind took place,” Kiger said.
“The kindest thing that can be said for the charges in the motion to strike is that they are churlish,” he concluded.
Attorney nonpayment
Another court document in a separate matter provided by a source requesting anonymity stems from a Philadelphia case.
In a filing from May, 2015, Maisano’s attorneys asked to be allowed to withdraw as her counsel in the guardianship of an older woman with a history of mental illness. Efforts to reach Gordon Wase, the filer of that document, for comment were unsuccessful
“Irreconcilable differences have arisen…and Wase & Wase has received no payments from any source over the course of the effort. Ms. Maisano and IKOR have failed to provide counsel with payment of their substantial legal bill now totaling $27,260,” the filing by the attorneys said.
“Ms. Maisano and IKOR have given counsel no explanations as to why they have not provided payments to Wase & Wase.”
Conclusions
Maisano did not return emails and text messages requesting comment for this article. When she was reached by phone by this reporter, she hung up. It’s unclear whether Maisano still works as a guardian. A 2017 article from PennLive said RiseMark Brands acquired IKOR in 2014, but it did not provide any information as to whether Maisano had any continuing role with the company.
The perils of guardianship are not unknown. For example, in 2023, Gov. Josh Shapiro signed a bipartisan bill meant to curb the possibility of courts overrelying on guardianships to solve difficult personal or family situations. But there are doubts about the law’s effectiveness, and there is also an admitted shortage of guardians for courts to choose from, according to media reports.
Still, the 2019 indictments in Delaware County stand testament to the potential for financial abuse, if not outright embezzlement.
“They’re paying for vacations for themselves and their families at Hilton [Hotel], while these incapacitated wards are in nursing homes, alone, and their bills aren’t even being paid,” then-District Attorney Kat Copeland said.
Now, with her book complete, Dimond took off her reporting hat to give an unvarnished opinion on what she witnessed with her own eyes.
“I have, over the course of a decade, gathered so many abusive guardianship case stories, and to my mind, Patricia Maisano is the epitome of an out of control guardian who acts like a bully, overcharges her wards, and is so arrogant and haughty as to make me think she needs a completely different line of work,” Dimond told Broad + Liberty.
“Her unprofessionalism, her arrogance in thinking that she is really the lord and master over a ward like Mrs. Winstanley — she can’t have a phone; people need to have permission to go and see her; she can’t leave the campus of the area where she lives; isolating her family members to certain specific hours that they can come and visit — this is bullying. This isn’t being the guardian angel that the public expects from a guardian, a court-appointed guardian. This is outright bullying for personal gain, in my opinion.”
The contrast between those accounts underscores the divide between Maisano’s critics and her political allies — and raises deeper questions about accountability in Pennsylvania’s guardianship system.
In a 2017 campaign video, Maisano referred to her work as a nurse and guardian before saying, “I know how to recognize and stop financial predators.”
Chester County Democrats renominated Maisano for her treasurer post in last month’s primary. Broad + Liberty approached the county Democratic leadership last year for reaction to the story that Maisano had been kicked out of court cases as an expert witness, but her party allies remained silent.
In a recent Facebook post, the Pennsylvania Federation of Democratic Women lauded Maisano as a “quiet force with a powerful impact. From flipping Chester County blue to mentoring countless candidates, Patricia leads with humility, heart, and unmatched determination. Her journey from survivor to trailblazer inspires us all.”
Where Dimond described Maisano as arrogant, the party described her as “humble.”
Not only does Maisano continue to receive the full backing of her party as Chester County’s treasurer, she gives speeches on elder abuse by guardians.
“March 5 Luncheon: Predatory Behavior,” the internet advertisement from the Charlotte Estate Planning Council said from 2019.
“This program will teach everyone in attendance the depth and breadth of this increasing issue. How to recognize it, who are the potential predators, how to address it with your client. There are also some ideas of what you can do to break the cycle and protect your client going forward.”
The featured speaker was Patricia Maisano. The corporate sponsor was IKOR.
(Editor’s note: At the height of IKOR’s influence, it sold elderly care franchises, at least two of which are still in operation in Pennsylvania today. Nothing in this article should be construed as negatively reflecting on those two entities, which appear to operate completely independently from Patricia Maisano. Broad + Liberty has no evidence of any kind of misconduct, alleged or otherwise, regarding those businesses.
About the documents in this report: Every effort has been made to withhold the names of persons in the documents who do not have direct bearing on the matter at hand. To that extent, names and other personally identifying information has been withheld, and some pages of the documents presented were completely deleted before publishing, but only if the pages had no relevance.)