Professional fiduciaries.

Assembly Member Flora's legislation enables professional fiduciaries to organize as corporations while establishing new oversight requirements for these entities. The bill authorizes licensed fiduciaries to form professional fiduciary corporations that can provide services currently limited to individual licensees, including acting as guardians, conservators, trustees, and estate administrators.

The legislation creates reporting mandates for these corporations, requiring them to submit detailed information to the Professional Fiduciaries Bureau about their structure, operations and client relationships. This includes disclosing all officers, directors, shareholders, and licensed employees, as well as maintaining logs of court-supervised and non-court-supervised cases with their aggregate managed asset values. The bureau must keep these corporate reports confidential except in specific circumstances like disciplinary proceedings or court orders.

The bill also modifies court appointment criteria, prohibiting superior courts from appointing professional fiduciaries as guardians, conservators, or trustees unless they either hold a current license, qualify for an exemption, or operate as a compliant professional corporation. For corporate appointments, petitions must specify which corporate member has primary case responsibility.

Individual licensees face expanded reporting duties, including declaring under penalty of perjury whether they serve clients through a professional corporation. The Professional Fiduciaries Bureau gains authority to discipline corporations that fail to respond to inquiries or submit required reports within 60 days of request.