Audit Report On The Monitoring By The Department Of Health And Mental Hygiene Of The Background Checks Of School-Age Child Care Program Employees

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s (DOHMH) mission is to protect and promote the health and mental well-being of all New Yorkers. The New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) entered into a contract with DOHMH to monitor programs that provide child care services requiring licensing and registration for group family child care, family child care, and school-age child care facilities. This audit focused on the monitoring by the DOHMH Bureau of Child Care (Bureau) of criminal history background checks and child abuse and maltreatment clearances for employees working at School-Age Child Care (SACC) programs.

The SACC programs are required to be registered with OCFS before they can provide afterschool services to children. To register, the programs must submit a State Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment (SCR) application listing all program workers so that OCFS can ascertain whether any individual is the subject of child abuse and maltreatment reports. In addition, all workers who are age 16 years or older must be fingerprinted and cleared through the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS).

Audit Findings and Conclusions

DOHMH’s Bureau of Child Care conducts the required compliance inspections of registered SACC programs in accordance with its State contract. We found that the Bureau exceeded the 50-percent inspection requirement and performed compliance inspections of more than 90 percent of the programs during calendar years 2008 and 2009. We further found that the Bureau maintained documentation as evidence that compliance inspections were performed for the 30 sampled SACC programs and when violations were found, Corrective Action Plans were provided to the Program Directors detailing the violations found and the length of time the program was given to correct the problem. Follow-up inspections were conducted to make certain that the violations were corrected. In addition, face-to-face safety assessment interviews were conducted for the four employees in our sample whose criminal history background checks had an indication of an arrest or conviction.

However, based on our site visits and review of personnel files, we found SCR clearance was not obtained, nor was an application even completed, for two of the 162 sampled workers requiring them at the time of our site visit. There was no evidence that SCR clearances were obtained for 24 (15 percent) workers as well, although there were SCR applications on file. Also, fingerprinting was not conducted, nor were criminal history checks completed, for 24 (12 percent) of the sampled 198 workers requiring them at the time of our visit. In addition to the above, we found that DOHMH Inspectors are inconsistent in maintaining evidence to verify the review of each worker’s personnel file during the compliance inspection.

Audit Recommendations

We make five recommendations, including that DOHMH:

• Ensure that SACC Program Directors immediately follow up on individuals cited in this report for lacking SCR clearances.
• Advise SACC Programs Directors to maintain a tracking system of all documents required for their workers to ensure that lacking documents can be identified and obtained.
• Ensure that DOHMH inspectors and Program Directors are informed that volunteers over the age of 16 years require fingerprint clearances.
• Require its inspectors to complete the Staff Information Chart along with the SACC Inspection Checklist.