Bill Myers and Michael Neibauer, The Examiner
2008-05-21 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

Contractors paid millions of dollars to look after D.C.’s foster children aren’t conducting criminal background checks on their staff, ignoring requirements to plan for their wards’ schooling and health care and not keeping track of children wandering in and out of their facilities, a new report has found.

D.C. Auditor Deborah Nichols surveyed six companies, paid a total of $7.6 million in public funds this year to look after the city’s children. The companies are required to run their employees’ names through vigorous background checks, but Nichols said she found uneven adherence to the requirement.

“As a result, individuals who have committed offenses that should bar them from working with youth may be employed,” Nichols wrote, “thus placing youth who are already vulnerable at further risk of harm or mistreatment.”

Nichols’ audit is the third of the city’s child welfare agency in the last two months. Previously, she found that the Child and Family Services Agency wasn’t watching the public’s dollar carefully and was handing out millions without proper contracts.

In her most recent report — dated May 16 but made public Tuesday — Nichols also wrote that the contractors weren’t keeping proper tabs on their wards by submitting daily attendance reports, were ignoring requirements to map out education and medical plans and weren’t following requirements for drafting quality assurance plans.

Though her audit sample was fairly small, Nichols concluded that it raises big questions for child welfare bureaucrats.

“The auditor is concerned that these deficiencies may be more pervasive,”  she wrote.

In her response to Nichols’ report, CFSA Director Sharlynn Bobo downplayed the significance of the missing criminal background checks. She said that Nichols could “only” find two cases in the files she examined, which — though “consistent with the routine findings” of her agency — is proof that city bureaucrats are doing their jobs.

Bobo and her aides have been on the ropes since the public discovered that child welfare bureaucrats ignored desperate calls to help the daughters of Banita Jacks. The girls’ badly decomposed bodies were found on the floor of a ramshackle home  in Southeast in January. Jacks is now charged with their murder.

bmyers@dcexaminer.com

smccabe@dcexaminer.com