Kids losing in DCF audits
The Kansas Department for Children and Families has found a new way to make life difficult for struggling families and the agencies that help them.
DCF has been conducting aggressive audits of Early Head Start programs. The preliminary audit reports recommend that DCF force 12 programs to repay about $650,000 in grant money – not because of fraud or waste but because of accounting issues such as missing forms (even when those forms don’t exist).
The harassing and uncertain nature of the audit was one reason why Wichita-based Child Start, one of the state’s largest child-development programs, decided earlier this year not to reapply for nearly $1 million in state grant funding. As a result, about 90 area children are no longer in the program.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Teresa Rupp, who has been executive director at Child Start for 31 years.
Early Head Start supports low-income families with pregnant women, infants and toddlers. It is federally funded, with some programs receiving state-administered grants, and is regularly audited. Rupp said that the federal government conducts a full independent audit of Child Start every year.
In December 2011, DCF decided to change the scope of its own audits. Now it is examining every transaction and virtually every time sheet and form.
“It is kind of like going after a fly with a sledgehammer,” Rupp told The Eagle editorial board.
The auditors recommended that Child Start be required to pay back almost $85,000, primarily because it didn’t have written approval from DCF to spend more on home visitations than was originally planned. Rupp said that DCF approved the expenditure.
“We called DCF and asked if there was a form we needed to fill out, and they said ‘no,’ that as long as we let them know, that was enough,” she told the Kansas Health Institute News Service.
Other Early Head Start programs have received similar notices. A Topeka program was notified that hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding might be withheld because it changed some job titles without notifying DCF.
“We’re talking about the same people with the same responsibilities, working the same hours with the same funding stream – but with different titles. And they were all disallowed,” the program’s director told KHI News Service.
A DCF spokeswoman said the agency has an obligation to taxpayers “to ensure that funds are being used as intended.” So far, it has spent $222,000 on the audits. But KHI News Service noted that some in the Head Start community think the audits are connected to the Legislature’s rejection of Gov. Sam Brownback’s 2011 proposal to eliminate state funding for Early Head Start – a claim DCF denies.
The audits do fit a pattern. In recent years, DCF has raised eligibility requirements for receiving welfare and food stamps, turned down federal funds aimed at helping needy Kansans, and intimidated agencies that challenged it.
The audits are the latest example of DCF treating providers and the people they serve as if they were crooks.
For the editorial board, Phillip Brownlee
This story was originally published October 15, 2014 at 7:07 PM with the headline "Kids losing in DCF audits."