Mary Beth Schneider for the Indianapolis Star has an article entitled Audit of FSSA finds 185 problems.
The audit, done by the New York firm of KPMG, outlined 185 problems. About half of those were identified as high-risk situations that need to be addressed as soon as possible.
The problems include inconsistent application of rules to determine whether someone is eligible for FSSA services; inadequate supervision of some mentally disabled patients at state facilities; and large caseloads that hinder caseworkers’ ability to do their jobs.
[FSSA Director Mitch] Roob said he was struck by “the breadth of the brokenness. Almost every place we looked in the agency there was something fundamentally flawed.”
I find the Democratic response (at least as reported in the article) on this one fairly unhelpful.
Mike Edmondson, executive director of the Indiana Democratic Party, found Roob’s four-year timetable — the length of Daniels’ initial term in office — politically convenient.
“At some point, the buck has got to stop with Mitch Daniels. He’s got to stop blaming his predecessors for everything,” Edmondson said. “This audit is another example of them lowering expectations and trying to shift the blame.”
I guess that’s sort of Edmondson’s job, but the fact is FSSA was seriously dysfunctional. My real critique (see here and here for prior iterations of this suggestion) of the Daniels administration vis-a-vis FSSA was his decision to go after DNR and IDEM with both barrels first when FSSA was probably the agency with the biggest problems.
One thing that caught my eye in the article was Roob’s amazement at the lack of central accounting for all of the divisions. I could be wrong, and my recollection is awfully sketchy on this point, but I believe the Family and Social Services Administration was a cobbling together of existing agencies. For a long time, maybe even still, there was considerable resistance to an integrated agency. I don’t know if the resistance was to creeping bureaucracy or something else. But, it manifested itself in at least one case while I was working for the General Assembly in the form of threats not to renew the FSSA. This wouldn’t have meant that the underlying divisions would dissolve, just that the administration tying them together would dissolve. (At least that’s how I remember it.) So, this legislative resistance to centralization at the FSSA could have contributed to the lack of centralized accounting — among other things.
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