Financial compensation is intended to help brain injury survivors manage their condition for the rest of their lives. But what happens when the money is lost through mismanagement, fraud or exploitation?
NR Times spoke to Liesel Annible – a forensic director at accountancy, financial and business advisory firm Armstrong Watson, to find out more about the financial investigation process.
Tell us a bit about your role and where it fits in the brain injury rehab journey.
I deal with cases where an individual is given a large amount of money as part of a settlement.
We regularly see situations where the family has submitted the account and somebody at the Court of Protection has said, hang on a minute, these accounts aren’t right, so a new deputy is appointed.
We get brought in to look at where that money has gone.
How does the process work?
We’ll usually start by looking through bank transactions and asking questions about things that don’t look right.
Why is there a bill for a Porsche when the child with the injury wouldn’t even be able to get in such a car? Or why is it necessary to pay for the whole family to go to Disneyland?
Often, a large settlement can be like Christmas for families. There’s all this temptation.
Or it could be that there’s no money left to fund the recipient’s care because it’s all been spent.
Is the legal framework adequate for dealing with this misuse of funds?
Nine times out of 10, if you’ve got a professional deputy in place, you’re fine because they know what they’re doing and they’re regulated. The problems often start with the families.
We dealt with one family with three children and one was severely disabled.
The family argued that because they spent a lot of time looking after the disabled child at the expense of the other two, they had the right to take them to Disneyland.
So they paid for the trip with the disabled child’s funds.
While I can understand the rationale, that’s just not acceptable.
They were given the funds to look after their disabled child’s needs, pay for medical expenses and the likes of adaptations to the home.
We also often have cases where children live a lot longer than expected due to developments in medical care.
In one case, a young girl who wasn’t expected to live beyond her teens was in her mid-20s and the money was starting to run out.
The Deputy believed some of the money may not have been spent properly.
Our investigation indicated that there had perhaps been some unwise spending, but it wasn’t anything that could be claimed on insurance or recovered from the family.
But the solicitors I was working with managed to handle the money in such a way that she was going to get care.
In that instance, it was also agreed that she could have a better and more independent life living in sheltered housing with some assistance.
What are some other examples?
There are many things that people can justify in their own minds. That’s when you get the grey areas.
We had one case where the family had a child who needed rehabilitation and a lot of exercise equipment.
They built a swimming pool in the garden, which was approved of and agreed.
But then when somebody visited the house, they found the pool neglected and full of leaves.
They’d spent all that money but it was a total waste. She was also supposed to be taken to the local pool, but that wasn’t happening either.
When you find that this misuse has happened, how soon can you address it? And how do you work with other professionals in the sector?
I’m often brought in by solicitors to help them investigate.
I also do a lot of work with the police. Not just on this, but all sorts of criminal matters, from murder to drug trafficking to money laundering.
Are there any changes that you’d like to see to make this process more efficient?
I’m working with the police on a case where an individual sustained a serious head injury from a car crash. He was awarded a sum of money and half of it was spent on buying a house.
The other half was there to provide his care for the rest of his life but he had control of the funds.
Unfortunately for him, two individuals moved into the house and it is alleged they have spent all his money.
That’s taken a considerable amount of time to get to the point where a full financial investigation is being undertaken.
At the moment, it can take three or four years to get to that point.
Even then there is no certainty that we can prove who has utilised the funds or that the Crown Prosecution Service will take the case forward for prosecution.
In my opinion there needs to be more financial protection for vulnerable individuals and reports of suspicious activity need to be acted on more quickly by the police.
What technologies do you use to improve efficiency in the work that you do?
We use specialist bank statement-scanning software that puts statements into Excel and allows us to analyse them.
But a lot of what we do is still quite manual, actually looking at items of expenditure, assessing whether they are reasonable and seeing where the money has gone.
What are some of the common scenarios that you come across? People often mention cases of funds being wasted on expensive cars. Do you see that a lot?
Unfortunately, I’ve dealt with quite a few cases where the person who has been looking after the money has decided they want a nice new car.
And then there’s a situation where third parties take advantage.
Quite often, the person with a brain injury doesn’t see the risks and ends up throwing around money to get friends: buying people gifts and drinks and so on.
Then someone latches onto them because they see the opportunity to take advantage.
In years gone by, neighbours might have intervened, but we’ve lost a lot of that community spirit.
People are living quite lonely lives on their own and they become victims.
Do you find that the funds sometimes go missing due to cybercrime?
Not so much cybercrime because that’s usually easy to see and can be dealt with by the police on their own.
We see more cases of individuals moving into the person’s house or persuading them to buy a car or other items for them.
This is clear to see in bank account statements.
The first thing we ask is, has the individual got a car that someone drives for them?
If not, why are there car parts on the statement? If the individual is not allowed to drive, who’s driving a car that these parts have gone to?
It can be really difficult, because how do we know they aren’t paying for their mum, for example?
The same goes for petrol costs. There are a lot of grey areas when it’s an adult.
It could be that the person is spending this money for their own benefit.
But when you have lots of cash withdrawals or money going backward and forward to different people’s accounts, it looks like a scam.
How do you stop inappropriate people being deputised?
If a child is born and there’s a settlement from medical negligence, the parents are often appointed to look after the money right from the start.
But in some cases, they’ll ask for professional deputies to be put in place or the Court of Protection will step in.
A professional deputy is often a solicitor or an accountant.
Every year, they have to draft a report for the Court of Protection detailing how the money has been spent.
When you look at some of the forms that families submit, they’re written in pencil, some of the things don’t add up or aren’t explained properly.
Then, at the extreme end, you have families who are actively looking to take advantage.
But then you have some incredibly good families looking after the funds who wouldn’t dream of doing anything wrong or are just doing the best they can.
