@BeyondtheRainbow - your story is an example of how bad things can go when no one is keeping track of an elder. Sometimes the elder has set himself up for this by a lifetime of behavior that alienated his family from him. Still, no one wishes to see anyone wind up in such distressful circumstances. However, local authorities are not geared up to do a whole lot about discovering and intervening in these situations. It takes a concerned citizen or family member to activate the system. An elder's inability to self-care has to be pretty extreme before anything much happens. Even then, it can take someone advocating and pushing to get the elder into a safe arrangement.

Often community social workers will contract with a homecare agency to send home attendants. I've known home attendants who spoke of visiting elders who had next to no food in their kitchens. Sometimes it's because they had family coming around taking their Social Security money. The attendant would report this to the homecare agency. These agencies are out for the money and don't want to rock the boat. So they don't alert social service agencies of the local government. I heard of a woman with dementia who was wandering half-naked through the halls of her apartment building, according to a home attendant who visited her. Not much was being done about it. It seems that the system doesn't really have accountability built into in. Some relatives of these incompetent elders care only about getting whatever the elder owns. They "borrow" from the elder's Social Security income. They don't want their elder going into a nursing home because that usually means the Socual Security checks stop. The O.P. has done the correct, moral thing. Sometimes doing the right thing is thankless.

I think anyone who knows of an elder living in bad circumstances does the right thing in getting some intervention underway.