A two-year investigation into privatized foster care services that identified a lack of data collection and oversight that place children at risk prompted U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) to introduce legislation on Tuesday to step up transparency and accountability.
Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the ranking member of the committee, launched an investigation into the trend of privatized foster care services in 2015 after news reports drew attention to questionable behavior from for-profit agencies, and abuse and neglect by foster parents working for those providers.
The investigation found that monitoring of child welfare systems, and those involving private providers in particular, is difficult or impossible due to a lack of data collection and oversight.
According to the Finance Committee’s report, “… children who are under the legal authority of their state, yet receive services from private for-profit agencies, have been abused, neglected, and denied services. The very agencies charged with and paid to keep foster children safe too often failed to provide even the most basic protections, or to take steps to prevent the occurrence of tragedies.”
In response, Hatch and Wyden introduced the Child Welfare Oversight and Accountability Act of 2017, S. 1964. The measure would take steps to enhance training for caseworkers, strengthen oversight and accountability of child welfare systems and establish incentives for foster children to be placed with family members.
“For many years, I have worked to improve outcomes for vulnerable children, and this bipartisan investigation uncovered that too often children in foster care are experiencing substandard care,” Hatch said. “The lack of oversight of the nation’s child welfare system, at both the state and federal level, is unacceptable.”
The lawmakers noted that a large private provider of foster care services called The MENTOR Network headquartered in Boston provided data and analysis to the committee staff that showed that over a 10-year period, about 70 percent of children’s deaths were unexpected.
Approximately 1,600 children die from abuse or neglect in the United States each year, deaths that often could have been prevented, a summary of the bill said.
“The Child Welfare Oversight and Accountability Act, which I introduced (on Tuesday) with Ranking Member Wyden, would help to ensure better government oversight and protect children in foster care in Utah and across the country,” Hatch said.
The bill would improve federal oversight of state child welfare systems. It would create penalties for states that fail to comply with federal child welfare program requirements. The legislation also mandates that states maintain a website that allows for public scrutiny of all contacts with private foster care providers. Additionally, the bill aims to increase understanding of child fatalities. Each state would need to conduct an annual review of all child fatalities related to mistreatment and make recommendations so that the future fatalities can be prevented, under the bill.
In addition to S. 1964, the Senate Finance Committee made a series of bipartisan recommendations to the Department of Health and Human Services, states and Congress about how to improve child welfare systems based on the report’s findings.
“Chairman Hatch and I are committed to making this issue a priority for the committee and will work to bring America’s foster care systems up to the standards our children deserve,” Wyden said.