A major concern in foster care has been the number of placements a child must experience. Children are often moved multiple times during the length of stay in foster care. There are community organizations which design programs to assist with the emotional moves of these children. Children's Rights has advocated for a reduction in the number of foster care placements in the courts.
Now, let's step back and take a look at other possible reasons for multiple foster care placements of children.
Fraud. Yes, fraud.
Under Title IV-E methodologies, the relocation of a foster child to another foster home is an administrative cost. These costs, rarely found outside of the eyes of the child placing agencies, are false.
It works like this: A child is placed in a foster home, then, the child is moved, for whatever reason a case worker can conjure, and placed in a new home. That administrative placement activity is then, billed, under Title IV-E payment rates. (Relative placements do not fall under foster care payment structures. In most states, presenting the most viable reason why states have been unsuccessful in adopting policies for relative placements...it ruptures fraud)
This is such a simplistic reimbursable cost activity that the administrative actors then take it to the next level. A child may have multiple placements on paper, but in all actuality, remain in one placement.
To validate these allegations, one must possess the authority to contemporaneously review court case files and the child placing agency administrative cost filings to the state. As the court documents are, in some instances, under seal, or impossible to access due (i.e. shredding, lost, misplaced, stolen, FOIA), the ability to execute a detailed forensic examination of the billing becomes equivalent to a uneccessary-drug-induced state of psychosis.
Then, layer this with the name of God and impenetrable iron curtain of child welfare destroying the innate concepts of transparency and accountability, and you have the makings of a fraud scheme in child welfare. All billing in child welfare is a secret.
Package this particular "revenue-maximization scheme" in the lack of state administrative oversight of these privatized contracts and rates (see p.4 allegation #4), and you have identified the financial incentives for multiple placements in foster care (whether true or false claims).
Michigan Catholic Social Services Investigative Report 2007
Transparency in child welfare will only rupture the rapture of the uncapped, federally funded fraud schemes.
4 comments:
Why are the court cases kept secret? To protect the child? Really? I'll bet everyone of their friends knows they've been placed into care... Protection from future bias? Well the agencies hang onto the records and use them against them anyways... And if you want to protect them from someone reading the court files... redact their names from the original record (which can be sealed) for public viewing. The interests of both child and parent can be protected while still allowing for a large amount of transparency.
You speak of individual reviews. I speak more on an aggregate level where privacy can be easily achieved with modern data management through biometric technologies.
Nice post. In NYS Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS). The fraud goes even further as court petitions are falsified to keep children incarcerated longer.
Submitting falsified court petitions to extend lengths of stay for foster kids and juvenile delinquents is a universal practice in all states, but I am quite sure New York is in the top 5 states (I want to say top 3 but must verify) when it comes to across the board child welfare fraud.
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