The accusations surrounding Chester County Treasurer Patricia Maisano have raised questions about her fitness for office.
Patricia Maisano, incumbent treasurer of Chester County, has been accused twice of fleecing elderly persons she was overseeing during her career as a professional guardian. She has also been accused by attorneys she was working with during a guardianship of nonpayment.
Recent research has also revealed that Maisano received her master’s and doctorate from a diploma mill. She was also removed from court cases after failing to meet standards as an expert witness.
In December of 2015, Maisano was appointed the guardian of Elizabeth Winstanley following the death of her husband.
Two of Elizabeth’s children did not want her under the care of a guardian although one of her sons did. Elizabeth’s son David spoke in a recent interview about the change to having Maisano as his mother’s guardian.
“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. She said, ‘From now on, I am your mother.’ That’s a quote. My sister can back that up as well,” he said.
A journalist exposed the overbilling committed by Maisano during her care of Elizabeth Winstanley. “During the first three months guardian Maisano was in charge of Winstanley’s life, she billed $50,599.18 for services rendered,” the journalist wrote.
The billings included “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 calls, the estate was charged a total of $1,560.”
David said, “[Maisano] called herself a guardian. She could make court testimony on mental capacity. 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.”
Recent research into Maisano’s nursing degree has been inconclusive. Her resume also raised questions, with no record of a “Crossroads Head Injury Center” existing. Her resume claims she worked there as a “national patient coordinator”.
Another report from 2009 by attorney Kristopher Starr found that Maisano “egregiously overbills. There is no way to soften, sugar coat, or otherwise explain this finding.”
Starr observed that Maisano exhibited “disturbing billing trends and tens of thousands of dollars in overbilled amounts.”
Maisano would bill an average of 20 minutes to type an email, 25 minutes per phone call, and 21 minutes to send a fax, according to Starr’s findings.
More recently, in 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.
“Irreconcilable differences have arisen… and Wase & Wase has received no payments from any source over the courts of this effort,” the filing attorneys wrote. Masano failed to provide counsel with payment of a legal bill that totaled $27,260.
The cases against Maisano in terms of her time as a legal guardian and the nonpayment to her attorneys has raised questions about her fitness for office.
In 2017, Maisano was first elected as treasurer of Chester County. She had switched from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.
