WAYNE COUNTY, MI ~ Wayne County officials created false data for computer audits of its child welfare programs. Many County administrators, along with a relative of the former Mayor of Detroit, enriched themselves in millions of dollars from false billing of child welfare programs which may have led to wrongful removals of children from families.
Computer glitches is another fancy term for fraud, whether intentional or not. Whatever the error, state and national statistics are now corrupt. If national data are corrupt, this would mean national policy is, also.
Corruption allows administrators and other officials to fraudulently enrich themselves with contracts and false billing. Policies are promoted to continue practices which would actually be proven to not generate beneficial results is there were no computer errors. Community programs are without funding and support. As a result, kids are put into foster care programs and the cycle of false claims begins again.
Damn. Computer errors hurt kids.
Computer glitch hid some CPS records for years, may have led to wrongful removals of children from families |
PHOENIX (AP) - A computer glitch at Arizona's child-welfare agency kept some public records hidden from parents and their lawyers for more than 15 years. The missing records could have led to children being improperly removed from their homes and stopped caregivers from filing civil claims against the state. Arizona Department of Economic Security officials were notifying the state's 15 presiding Juvenile Court judges of the glitch on Friday. They also were sending notices to more than 30,000 people who received incomplete public records in the past two years but the state is unable to track or notify those who requested and received incomplete records before 2010. The agency oversees the Child Protective Services agency. The records fiasco is the latest blow to the embattled agency. It has spent the past year unsuccessfully trying to stem record growth in the number of children in foster care, stop high staff turnover and reduce caseloads. Those receiving notices include parents involved in the nearly 8,600 open dependency cases, about 1,500 parents who have requested records on their CPS cases, nearly 1,200 judicial or law-enforcement requests, 55 members of the media and more than 21,000 attorneys. "If a case got to the wrong result because information wasn't disclosed, that's a big, big problem," said Mark Kennedy, who has represented about 400 parents over the past three years. "To me, it's pretty significant when CPS says we're going to contact 21,000 lawyers. That's like saying, 'Start searching your case files because there may be some problems out there.'" Maricopa County Juvenile Court Judge Aimee Anderson said she expects it to become a larger issue for civil, criminal and family courts than the Juvenile Court, where about 90 percent of dependency cases are settled without a trial. But she added that a lot depends on what information was missing from the requested records. "It's hard to know the real impact that this is going to have, because we don't know what we didn't get," she said. "I really think the state's bigger problem is in the criminal arena ... and lawsuits against the department." CPS case information is confidential under state and federal laws, but parents and caregivers who are the subject of CPS reports, and their attorneys, are supposed to have access to much of it. That allows them to better defend themselves against allegations of abuse or neglect or efforts to place their children in foster care or permanently end their parental rights. In addition, the agency must publicly release certain information on child fatalities or near fatalities and is permitted to confirm, clarify or correct information about ongoing cases that has been made public by another source, such as law enforcement. Attorneys who represent parents and children in CPS cases say withholding these public records could prove costly for the state if it turns out children were removed from or returned to parents based on incomplete or inaccurate information. DES spokeswoman Tasya Peterson said the problem was discovered in June during an annual review of the agency's public-disclosure practices. An employee noticed that different sets of records were released to different parties in the same case. Further review found the database system that tracks CPS cases, called CHILDS, had been programmed to print about one-third of the information considered public record under state and federal law. The programming error had been in place since the database was created in 1996. "We thought we were printing out everything that there was," Peterson said. "We didn't have any reason to believe until this summer that we were not meeting our obligations." Attorney Jorge Franco said he's not surprised that CPS has discovered problems with its public disclosure. He has sued CPS roughly 20 times and won seven-figure verdicts against the agency. Franco said the computer glitch could expose the state to liability if it can be shown that additional records would have changed the outcome of a case. "I have absolutely no doubt that because of this (CPS has) gotten a pass on tons of claims," Franco said. "The big 'so what' is that the statistics ... are skewed by the fact that there's a bunch of claims out there that never made it into claims." |
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