DCF audit at issue
The Department of Children and Families has made progress since high-profile deaths rocked the agency and inspired major reforms. But state Auditor Suzanne Bump yesterday pointed out areas where the agency may still be falling short. With the safety of children at stake, DCF has a duty to address those shortcomings.
Bump, for her part, has a corresponding duty not to overstate them.
A performance audit that covered 2014 and 2015 concluded that DCF was unaware of 260 cases in which children who were receiving agency services had experienced serious medical incidents, including assaults, drug overdoses and suicide attempts. They included a 15-year-old with brain damage from a gunshot and a 1-year-old with serious burns.
To reach that conclusion auditors dug through MassHealth claims data, and said DCF should be routinely and proactively doing the same. Given that all kids under DCF care are covered by MassHealth that seems an entirely reasonable recommendation.
The agency also identified 19 incidents of abuse, neglect and/ or sexual abuse of children during the audit period that were not reported to district attorneys. DCF said in all 19 cases the local DA was consulted even if a formal referral hadn’t been completed (a claim Bump disputed). But DCF also said it has implemented changes to its policy for those referrals.
After that, a good chunk of the audit focuses on interagency reporting procedures — but one might not know that from Bump’s suggestion yesterday that DCF doesn’t take sexual abuse seriously. Her evidence for that claim is that DCF does not report every “critical incident” — including incidents of sexual abuse — to the state Office of the Child Advocate, which is an oversight agency. But that doesn’t mean DCF just blows those incidents off, which was the impression Bump left.
The recommendations in this audit are thought-provoking and worthy of consideration. Given the seriousness of the issues at hand — and the charged climate in which they are being presented — the rhetoric ought to match the findings.