---
title: "A California Bureau That Polices Conservators Went Two Years Without a Director"
description: "The Professional Fiduciaries Bureau licenses the people who control the money and care of Californians who cannot manage their own. Newsom has now named Nicole Dragoo to run it, filling a post empty since August 2024."
category: "California"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/california
author: "Lucía Fuentes"
published: 2026-07-31T13:55:10.000Z
updated: 2026-07-31T13:55:10.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/a-california-bureau-that-polices-conservators-went-two-years-without-a-director
tags: ["conservatorship", "elder-abuse", "consumer-protection", "sacramento", "oversight"]
---
# A California Bureau That Polices Conservators Went Two Years Without a Director

The Professional Fiduciaries Bureau licenses the people who control the money and care of Californians who cannot manage their own. Newsom has now named Nicole Dragoo to run it, filling a post empty since August 2024.

If a court decides an adult can no longer manage their own affairs and no family
member takes the job, a licensed professional fiduciary does. That person can
control the money, the housing and the medical decisions of someone who has lost
the legal right to object.

In California, the agency that licenses and disciplines those fiduciaries has not
had a director since August 2024. Governor Gavin Newsom has now appointed one.

## The appointment

Nicole Dragoo, of Fair Oaks, will lead the Professional Fiduciaries Bureau at a
salary of $118,824,
[CalMatters reported](https://calmatters.org/investigation/2026/07/california-pfb-director-newsom/).
She previously served as licensing chief at the agency that oversees California's
private postsecondary schools. The appointment requires Senate confirmation.

Carole Herman, an elder advocate who helped bring the bureau into existence, was
not effusive. "It's about time," she said. "I hope she does better than everybody
in the past, which doesn't take much for her to do."

## What the reporting found

The vacancy is the news hook, but it is not the substance of the complaint against
the bureau. CalMatters' reporting describes an agency whose enforcement rests
substantially on fiduciaries reporting their own misconduct, that has held
incomplete and inaccurate records on the people it licenses, and that has released
limited information about them by design, having sought legislative changes
narrowing what it must disclose.

The pace is the part that matters most to families. In one case the reporting
cites, complaints were filed beginning in 2019 and the fiduciary's license was not
revoked until 2024.

## Why this bureau exists at all

The bureau
[licenses professional fiduciaries](https://www.fiduciary.ca.gov/) who serve as
conservators, guardians, trustees and agents under powers of attorney, meaning it
regulates the small class of people paid to hold that authority over strangers.
It was created in the 2000s after reporting on professional conservators who took
control of elderly Californians' estates.

The structural problem is straightforward. A conservatee is by definition someone
a court has found unable to manage their own affairs. They are, therefore, the
population least able to detect being defrauded and least able to complain
effectively about it. An oversight body for that population that runs on
self-reporting is relying on the honesty of the only party in the room with both
the information and the motive to withhold it.

## What to watch

Confirmation is the first step. After that, the tests are mundane and measurable:
whether the bureau's licensee records become accurate, how long complaints take
from filing to resolution, and whether the agency asks the Legislature to restore
any of the disclosure requirements it previously sought to narrow.

Two years without a director is a long time for a regulator, but a director alone
does not fix a design in which the regulated party is the primary source of
information about itself.

## Sources

- [This embattled consumer agency went 2 years without a director. Newsom finally appointed one](https://calmatters.org/investigation/2026/07/california-pfb-director-newsom/)
- [Professional Fiduciaries Bureau](https://www.fiduciary.ca.gov/)