Audit Report On The Oversight Of The Administration For Children’s Services’ Certification Process For Foster Parents

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) works to ensure the safety and well-being of children and families residing in New York City (City) by providing child welfare, juvenile justice and education services.  ACS contracts with private nonprofit organizations to support and stabilize families at risk of a crisis through preventive services, and provides foster care services for children not able to safely remain at home.   ACS currently has contracts with 23 foster care providers for a total amount of $1,067,312,031.^[1]

The New York State (State) Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) regulates and supervises foster care in the State.    For counties outside of the City, a local Department of Social Services manages the respective county’s foster care services.   Within the City, ACS carries out that responsibility.  When children are placed in foster care, the Family Court gives the ACS commissioner “temporary custody of the children.”

In accordance with ACS’s contracts with nonprofit foster care providers, the providers are responsible for certifying individuals’ eligibility to be foster parents based on certification requirements set forth in Title 18, paragraph 443.2, of the New York Codes, Rules and Regulations (NYCRR).   Each provider has a Home Finding Department for this purpose.  The Home Finding Department conducts the certification and recertification processes through which it ensures that each prospective foster family meets all regulatory requirements before foster children can be placed in their care.  Foster homes must be recertified on an annual basis.

OCFS requires that the following prerequisites be met in order for anyone to become a foster parent:

• Training – foster parents must receive parenting training to ensure that they have knowledge of how to properly care for the foster child. Newly certified foster parents who are not relatives of the child are required to receive a minimum of 30 hours; relatives applying to serve as emergency foster parents must receive 15 hours; and all foster parents seeking recertification must receive 6 hours annually.
• Medical Exams – all household members must be in good medical condition and must be tested for tuberculosis (TB).
• Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)/Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment (SCR) Clearance – foster parents, and any household member who turns 18 years of age prior to or during the placement period of a foster child, must be cleared through a check of criminal records maintained by the FBI and a separate check of the SCR so as to ensure that the household is a safe environment for the foster child;
• Home Study Narrative – a social worker must visit the prospective foster home to determine whether the physical space meets the State’s requirements, such as the installation of window guards where necessary, an appropriate number of beds, and overall cleanliness.
• References – for an initial certification, all foster parents must provide three references who can attest to the character of the foster parent.

ACS’s procedures require its Provider Agency Measurement System (PAMS) unit to perform an annual Foster Parent Training and Certification Records audit of a sample of each contracted foster care provider’s home files for its newly certified and first year recertified foster parents. [2]  The purpose of these audits is to determine whether providers have evidence that the required steps were performed and required documents were collected prior to certifying parents to provide foster care.

Audit Findings and Conclusions

The audit found that ACS does not have adequate oversight over the foster care certification process performed by its contracted foster care providers.  As a result, during Fiscal Year 2017, 81 percent of the 110 sampled foster home files that we reviewed were missing evidence of one or more of the prerequisites required for a family to be certified to provide foster care—specifically: mandated training; medical exams; an FBI and/or SCR clearance; a home study narrative establishing that the physical space met State requirements; and character references for new foster parents.

We found that ACS has no process in place to independently verify that its contracted foster care providers are properly certifying prospective foster care families in accordance with City and State requirements prior to their issuance of certifications and the placement of children with foster families.   In addition, although ACS conducts post-certification audits to assess whether required steps were taken and documented for recently certified and recertified foster care families,  we found that ACS is not utilizing this tool effectively.  We identified deficiencies in both the methodology employed to conduct these audits and the agency’s follow-up on issues that are noted during the audits.   As a result, we found that, when using ACS’s methodology, 9 (24 percent) of the 37 homes that ACS found to be compliant with City and State certification requirements during its audits lacked the requirements for certification.  For those foster homes that ACS audits determined to not be in full compliance with applicable City and State requirements, the length of time that these homes were certified prior to the ACS audits ranged from 90 to 484 days; seven of these homes were allowed to recertify in the following year, while they continued to be out of compliance.

A significant factor that directly contributed to the above weaknesses is that ACS management has failed to develop, implement and employ procedures and measures to effectively monitor and oversee its contracted foster agencies with regard to the foster care certification process.

Audit Recommendations

To address the issues raised by this audit, we make the following four recommendations:

• ACS should develop a review process that ensures that foster care providers do not certify prospective foster care families until the providers have collected the required evidence to demonstrate that the families have met the City and State’s requirements.
• ACS should set deadlines for providers to correct all deficiencies identified in the annual audits.
• ACS should implement procedures that require staff to follow-up on the annual audits to ensure that providers either correct all deficiencies identified in those audits or work with ACS to develop a plan to correct them.
• ACS should update and adhere to its audit methodology so that it checks for all documents required for a certification, includes all homes as part of its audit size, limits the advance notice it provides, independently confirms information about the foster family status of families selected for audit, and ensures that it selects the required number of families to audit.

Agency Response

In its response, ACS generally disagreed with the audit’s findings.  After carefully reviewing ACS’s arguments, we find no basis to alter any of the findings of this report.  Regarding the audit’s recommendations, ACS responded that it agreed with three of them, stating that these recommendations reflected the agency’s current practices.  ACS disagreed with the remaining recommendation that it develop a review process to ensure that foster care families are not certified until the associated foster care providers have collected all prerequisites, arguing that the recommendation was not needed because the State empowered and authorized providers to conduct such certifications.

[1] All of these contracts are due to expire on June 30, 2020.

[2] The results of which are referred to by ACS as the Foster Parent Training and Certification Records audit.