System Benefits

Pennsylvania ranks 4th in the nation for the highest population percentage of elders over age 65.

Recognizing this issue, the state’s Supreme Court formed the Elder Law Task Force in 2014, which was tasked with recommending ways to better protect the Commonwealth’s rapidly growing population of elders.

The Advisory Council on Elder Justice in the Courts was established to oversee the implementation of the task force’s many recommendations – one of which was the development of the Guardianship Tracking System (GTS) to monitor guardian activity at a statewide level.

On an even broader scale, GTS will help better protect adults of all ages under guardianship while effectively streamlining the process of filing guardianship annual reports and the inventory. In fact, the GTS was developed by the judiciary to be equally beneficial to all parties involved in the guardianship process –incapacitated persons, guardians and the courts.

Among its many benefits, the GTS will:

1. Allow guardians to file inventories and annual reports of the person and the estate online
2. Send automatic reminders and overdue notices to guardians
3. Reduce the potential for filing errors
4. Alert courts statewide about concerning guardian activity
5. Pre-populate annual reports
6. Automatically identify red flags and allow courts to respond to potential problems quickly
7. Offer online help text to help familiarize guardians with the new system
8. Establish statewide consistency for monitoring guardianships
9. Eliminate potential for an unsuitable guardian to relocate to another county
10. Provide statewide data about guardianships

 GTS was implemented in Dauphin County, PA in August, 2018 and will be fully-operational statewide by the end of 2018.