“Rampant Overbilling”
The District of Columbia Court of Appeals agreed in the main with findings of the trial court that a court-appointed guardian had overbilled for services to his ward
Finally, we note our serious misgivings about Gardner’s practices in this case, as admirably detailed in Judge Pittman’s July 23, 2020, order. Over the course of five years, Gardner sought to collect nearly $500,000 of Pearl Robinson’s once considerable, and now depleted, assets. He did so through thousands upon thousands of 0.1 hour (or 6 minute) entries submitted to the court for approval at a rate of $300 per hour for everyday tasks requiring no specialization whatsoever. Only once his blizzard of charges is totaled does one see the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Gardner sought for rudimentary and largely automatable tasks such as check writing, delivery services, checking blood pressure readings, and other chores that could have been assigned to a home health aide paid closer to $25 an hour than the $300 Gardner sought to charge. He also billed Robinson for other questionable tasks like an hour of “listening to CNBC” for information on stocks, at a rate of $300. The trial court’s conclusion that “Gardner is guilty of rampant overbilling” is substantiated by the record.
To highlight just a few more specifics of Gardner’s practices in this case that concerned Judge Pittman: Gardner sought $16,000 from Robinson for writing checks over the course of a single year. He charged Robinson $420 for a single trip to CVS to pick-up her prescriptions. Gardner billed Robinson for five times as many hours as the guardian for Robinson’s daughter Karen over the same period of time, even though Robinson and Karen were—in the trial court’s words—“similarly situated” in terms of the care they needed. And after moving Robinson into a nursing home, Gardner petitioned the court to sell her home, valued at $650,000, at least in part to pay his mounting fees. The court denied his petition because Robinson’s daughter Karen was a co-owner and joint tenant of that home and retained a right of survivorship in it, a fact that Gardner failed to disclose in his petition to sell the home. While the trial court found that omission “inexplicabl[e],” one possible explanation is that it was a deliberate omission: Gardner wanted to tap into Robinson’s home equity and disclosing Karen’s ownership interest in the shared home likely would have prevented him from doing that, so he wanted to conceal Karen’s interests in the home.
We have previously detailed similar concerns about Gardner’s billing practices over the course of several published opinions.
Held
we affirm the trial court’s orders as to all but the third guardianship petition and remand for further proceedings. The trial court on remand should provide additional reasons for its award as to that petition, consistent with the reasoning above. It is within the court’s discretion to decrease Gardner’s compensation if there is a sufficient factual basis for doing so.
(Mike Frisch)