HARRISBURG — A high-level Pennsylvania Department of Aging staffer claims the agency is retaliating against him for being a whistleblower and raising alarms about the state’s failures in protecting older adults from abuse and neglect. He’s now notified top Shapiro administration officials that he intends to sue.
In a demand letter sent to Gov. Josh Shapiro and other high-ranking officials late last week, Aging Services Supervisor Richard Llewellyn alleges department brass thwarted his efforts to assist investigations by outside agencies, including the Office of State Inspector General, into the quality of older adult protective services around Pennsylvania.
Llewellyn also alleges that top department officials purposely suppressed or manipulated data to shield problems when responding to public records requests. One top aging official, Llewellyn contends, even bragged about his ability to exploit loopholes to dodge having to turn over complete and accurate data.
When he objected to and later reported the alleged wrongdoing to other state officials, Llewellyn said he was subjected to a “campaign of retaliation,” including targeted administrative complaints and investigations. He said he was also stripped of work duties — notably, gathering accurate information in response to Right-to-Know requests.
“These and other actions were undertaken to intimidate Mr. Llewellyn, deter him from legally protected activity, as well as personally and professionally harm him,” Llewellyn’s lawyer, Bryn Mawr attorney Mark D. Schwartz, wrote in the demand letter. It was sent to Shapiro; Shapiro’s top lawyer, Jennifer Selber; and Aging Secretary Jason Kavulich, among other top Pennsylvania officials.
Spokespeople for both Shapiro and Kavulich said they do not comment on pending litigation or personnel issues.
In Pennsylvania, county-level agencies investigate allegations of abuse and neglect involving older adults and come up with service plans to keep them safe. The state Department of Aging funds and oversees them, and monitors the quality of their work.
A more than yearlong Spotlight PA investigation found that many of those agencies are woefully slow in completing investigations after learning an older adult may be in harm’s way, despite strict state-mandated timelines for action. In some instances, these significant and persistent failures have led to devastating or catastrophic outcomes.
At the same time, the number of older adults who have died while their abuse and neglect cases were under investigation has increased dramatically over the past seven years, data analyzed by Spotlight PA show. Despite this, the department under Kavulich stopped tracking why those older adults died — and whether the system failed them.
Some former employees have also criticized his administration over policy changes they believe defang the department’s oversight powers.
Demand letters are formal, written notices of impending civil litigation. They provide a broad description of the allegations that would be leveled in a lawsuit, and give the prospective defendants the chance to avoid lengthy and costly litigation and resolve a dispute outside of court.
In his demand letter, Llewellyn said he seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. He wants to be reinstated to his position within the department, where he supervises staff who assess how well county-level aging agencies fare in keeping older adults safe.
Llewellyn is also asking for changes to the department's protective services protocols and its senior management “so that the Commonwealth will perform its statutory mandate to protect the elderly,” according to the demand letter.
In an interview this week, Schwartz said what Llewellyn “really wants is for the [department] to fulfill its mandate of serving older adults in need of protection” — a mandate he asserted the state is failing to meet.
Kavulich, who was appointed by Shapiro in 2023 to helm the department, has said he has reformed its policies to hold counties more accountable and publicize more information about their performance.
The department, for the first time, began placing key performance data on its website over the past year. Kavulich has also said he intends to establish clear penalties for county aging agencies that chronically fail to comply with state regulations.
Yet Kavulich, who once ran Lackawanna County’s aging agency, has also been criticized by some former aging employees as being too soft on the counties, and for making it easier for counties to appear compliant with the rules — an assertion Kavulich denies.
This year, Kavulich replaced the old system of monitoring county aging agencies with a new assessment tool that critics say could mask failures in keeping older adults safe.
The new tool, called CAPE for short, eliminated the weighted system of scoring county aging agencies, meaning counties are no longer graded more harshly for serious investigative failures, Spotlight PA has reported. The department now equally scores relatively minor problems — such as poorly kept paperwork — and more serious deficiencies, such as failing to swiftly complete abuse and neglect investigations.
Several months ago, Auditor General Tim DeFoor’s office launched a special performance audit of the Aging department’s protective services programs, with an emphasis on the CAPE system, according to emails and other documents reviewed by Spotlight PA. The full scope of the probe is not known, but the office does make public findings from such audits.
The Office of State Inspector General was also investigating the Aging department’s protective services system as recently as last year, records reviewed by Spotlight PA show.
But the office has repeatedly refused to release findings, or even say whether it produced an investigative report. Those reports are not always made public, although the governor typically receives a copy.
Llewellyn, according to the demand letter and other documents reviewed by Spotlight PA, was a witness in both investigations.
Those documents show Llewellyn told investigators — as well as top lawyers in the Department of Aging — that he was concerned the department improperly withheld data in response to a public records request by Spotlight PA.
Last year, the news organization requested historical data showing whether counties had complied with state regulations in keeping older adults safe. Spotlight PA later determined the department did not disclose complete and accurate information, an omission that created a false impression about how frequently those offices complied with the rules.
In July, Llewellyn was suspended for 60 working days without pay. Schwartz, his lawyer, said the suspension followed “spurious” allegations that triggered an ongoing — and unnecessarily prolonged — investigation.
The demand letter does not describe the allegations that led to the suspension. Documents obtained by Spotlight PA indicate Llewellyn was reported to the governor’s Office of Administration, which oversees personnel issues, for allegedly deleting data sets, even though he told Aging officials those data still exist and were accessible. Llewellyn was not told who reported him.
Llewellyn is separately being investigated for a Facebook post he made this past March that was perceived as being critical of Kavulich. That probe, also launched in July, is ongoing.
Earlier this year, records show, the department also investigated Llewellyn on allegations that he violated the department’s technology policy, but he was cleared.