Rule of Construction

The general public has been only allowed to be informed on one small component of Social Security Title IV-E, and that is foster care placement reimbursement.

Similar to the concept of child support, Title IV-E funds the "food and shelter" portion of the care of the child, but Title IV-E is entails much more than this. A major, mostly unspoken component of Title IV-E is training.

Very little is known outside the inner circles behind the iron curtain of child welfare regarding the rule of construction.

The rule of construction is, in essence, how a state interprets the federal mandates regarding Title IV-E funding, how data are to be collected and warehoused, and how a state may stay in substantial compliance.

In 1980 Congress revised foster care provisions of the Social Security Act (SSA) (Public Law 96-272) to create what we know today as Title IV-E (42, US Code, Sections 670-675).

SSA Title IV-E reimburses States the federal portion through the Federal Financial Participation (FFP) rate, the same rates found in Targeted Case Management called Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP). But for administrative costs, the FFP is 50% for eligible costs.

Here is a list of eligible Title IV-E administrative expenditures:

• (i) Referral to services;
• (ii) Preparation for and participation in judicial determinations;
• (iii) Placement of the child;
• (iv) Development of the case plan;
• (v) Case reviews;
• (vi) Case management and supervision;
• (vii) Recruitment and licensing of foster homes and institutions;
• (viii) Rate setting; and
• (ix) A proportionate share of related agency overhead.
• (x) Costs related to data collection and reporting.

In order for the Feds and the States to split the costs, the States must be in substantial compliance.

Substantial Compliance

Substantial compliance basically means that when the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and its Regional and Central Offices come to do an on-site review of the State agency for Title IV-E eligibility of children, it must come within 0.10% of statistical significance in random sample of cases reviewed.

TRANSLATION: The ACF allows a state agency a maximum of 8 children out every 88 simple random sampling to be taken from their homes, placed in foster care, Parental Rights Terminated, and adopted out when they were never eligible.   Substantial compliance means a state is allowed to make so many administrative mistakes, such as fictitious billing, over medication and unnecessary medication, phantom services, ineffective services, improper and unnecessary removals, waste and abuse of funds, defalcation, embezzlement, sexual abuse, physical abuse, torture, murder, human trafficking, oh the list goes on and on but the idea of a "state mistake", I believe, is understood.

So what happens if the state agency is not in substantial compliance?

A state determined to be in “non-compliance” has to develop a Program Improvement Plan and go through a secondary on-site review with a sample of 150 cases taken from the most recent Adoption and Foster Care Automatic Reporting System (AFCARS) submission to come within 0.10% statistical significance.

That means that the second time the feds review the state Title IV-E eligibility, they are allowed to get away with more mistakes

Even though the number of children may go from 8 to 15 who were found not eligible for foster care, it is still considered a 10 percent error of the random sampling.

Basically, States send up case level information, whenever and however they want, to the ACF and its contracted entity, that is eventually used for research and purposes of funding. As it has been seen here, it does not matter if children are improperly or unnecessarily removed from their homes or even tortured in foster care, because the numbers still get crunched by those who never hear about the "mistakes behind the iron curtain":

Child Welfare League of America
Children's Rights
Child Welfare Gateway Information
National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect

Quintessentially, all data and methods by which these data are handled, are false and suspect in child welfare due to "substantial compliance."

This is fraud.

There is a reason why the ACF, U.S. DHHS and its Regional and Central Offices allow the fraud to happen and it has a name:

RULE OF CONSTRUCTION

The Rule of Construction says:

Sec. 478. [42 U.S.C. 678] Nothing in this part shall be construed as precluding State courts from exercising their discretion to protect the health and safety of children in individual cases, including cases other than those described in section 471(a)(15)(D).

TRANSLATION: States can train its people to do whatever they want and there is nothing Federal can do to stop them.  Sometimes there are those who must suffer for the benefit of all, for child welfare is an industry.

The following are examples of child welfare training that are not acceptable for Title IV-E reimbursements:

• CPR is not eligible for Title IV-E training.
• Cornell's TCI training is not eligible for Title IV-E training.

Cornell Lead Title IV -E Training for County of Santa Clara Social Services 2009