Gregory Oveross was supposed to manage his clients’ money responsibly. Instead, prosecutors say he and a business partner drained roughly $6 million from accounts belonging to elderly and infirm clients — and did so, in part, by leaving critical sections of his required court paperwork blank, according to court records reviewed by CalMatters.

The case is the latest example of how California’s safeguards against fiduciary abuse have quietly eroded or gone unenforced over the past two decades, according to reporting from CalMatters investigative journalist Byrhonda Lyons, who has spent much of this year examining the state’s probate court system.

Lyons’ latest findings, part of her ongoing “Broken Trusts” series, reveal two significant breakdowns in oversight that allowed Oveross to allegedly continue exploiting his clients for years.

The first involves judges failing to flag obvious warning signs. In 2006, state lawmakers required fiduciaries to submit more detailed financial reports, including check numbers, so courts could more easily spot irregularities such as missing or unexplained transactions. In theory, the system should have made it difficult for someone like Oveross to write himself checks without detection.

In practice, it didn’t work that way. According to court filings, Oveross wrote himself 19 checks totaling $670,000 from a single client’s account over the course of one year. When it came time to report those transactions to the court, he simply left the check-number column empty. A Los Angeles County judge approved the filing anyway.

“Not having check numbers would be a big red flag,” said Judge Sandra Bean, the supervising judge for probate court in Alameda County, in response to Lyons’ findings.

The second failure centers on the state agency responsible for licensing and monitoring professional fiduciaries. In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that would have required courts to alert the Professional Fiduciaries Bureau whenever a judge disciplined a fiduciary for misusing their license. But that requirement was contingent on state funding that lawmakers never provided, leaving the bureau largely dependent on fiduciaries to self-report problems honestly.

Oveross did not. Lyons’ review of his annual filings with the bureau found that he omitted at least one case in which he had been accused of wrongdoing. For two consecutive years, he also left blank a required question asking whether he had settled any complaints against him.

Despite those omissions, the bureau renewed his license each year without incident.

Even after complaints about Oveross’s conduct reached the bureau and were referred to the California Department of Justice, it took two more years before his license was revoked — and that revocation came less than two weeks after his arrest.

The case underscores a broader pattern documented throughout CalMatters’ investigative series: oversight systems built to protect some of the state’s most vulnerable residents — elderly Californians who can no longer manage their own affairs — often exist on paper more than in practice.

Readers can find Lyons’ full report, along with the rest of the “Broken Trusts” series examining California’s probate courts, through CalMatters’ ongoing investigative coverage.

Original source: CalMatters

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