Some Florida Nursing Homes Escape Responsibility for Negligent Care

Florida has become a haven for corrupt nursing home operators that use the corporate form to hide their assets from Florida nursing home abuse lawyers attempting to hold them accountable for injury, neglect, abuse and death that occurs in their nursing home facilities. Charles Elmore, a writer for the Palm Beach Post has done an excellent job at exposing one form of the corporate shell game that goes on involving nonprofit corporations. In his article entitled "Post investigation: Nursing home CEO pulls in hefty pay, patients' families frustrated", he details what appears to be the extravagant siphoning of money by top corporate family executives in one Florida nonprofit nursing home chain that has been cited by regulators for substandard nursing home care.

Charles Elmore's article focuses on the Okeechobee Council on Aging Inc. and the Council on Aging of Florida Inc which apparently own nursing homes in Pahokee, Gainesville, and Bradenton Florida. Unfortunately, the type of corporate wrongdoing that he alleges occurred in this case is very common in Florida nursing homes. In this case, the vehicle used was the nonprofit corporation. In other cases, the vehicle used is the limited liability company or LLC. Regardless of the corporate form, the result is always the same. A complicated structure of interlocking corporations is used to siphon money away from nursing home patient care and into the hands of the individuals that are pulling the strings. The complicated corporate structure insulates the wrongdoers at the top from responsibility for the injury, neglect, abuse, and death that occurs in the nursing homes while simultaneously protecting the corporate assets from judgments and collection efforts by Florida nursing home neglect attorneys. In fact, the insulation is so complete that most of them do not even bother to obtain liability insurance. Often the wrongdoers are never held accountable for diverting money that should be used for nursing home patient care into their pockets.
Accountability is avoided because of the way the law allows nursing home operators to layer interlocking corporations. I will discuss the interlocking structures in the next post.