The Pennsylvania Department of State has fined a nursing home operator $15,000, alleging that it misappropriated funds designated for a new Alzheimer’s disease unit.
Presbyterian Senior Living also must pay back $49,000 to one donor, according to the complaint. PSL is based in Dillsburg, PA, and operates some 33 retirement and senior care facilities in the Mid-Atlantic region.
The case dates back to early 2010, when Presbyterian’s St. Andrew’s Village, in Indiana, PA, began raising dollars to renovate and expand its memory support unit, which treats Alzheimer’s patients. A family member, G. Andrew Voytus, donated $100,000, on the condition that it only be used to specifically expand or renovate that space.
Presbyterian, however, later decided to build a completely new facility for its memory support unit. Voytus, however, balked and asked for the remaining balance of the donation, a little over $49,000. The donor subsequently filed a complaint with the Department of the State in January 2015. Presbyterian, meanwhile, was unable to comply with Voytus’s request for detailed accounting records of the project, as it had instituted a new computer system, along the way.
To resolve the matter, Presbyterian has agreed to pay an administrative fine of $15,000, along with the sum of $49,169 to Voytus, and another $2,500 to donor Nancy Geary.
In a phone interview Friday with McKnight’s, Jeffrey Davis, chief financial officer with Presbyterian Senior Living, said the operator “does not admit to any wrongdoing at all,” and that it wanted to simply settle the matter so as not to have to pay for further unending litigation.
“We felt it was best for the interest of the community and the state, and perhaps our reputation, to just get on with it, versus spending hundreds of thousands more trying to defend it,” he told McKnight’s. “We don’t feel we were fairly represented by the state. We feel they took the donor’s point of view, but it is what it is. It’s unfortunate and we’re not ashamed of it, but we wish it had never happened.”
