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   (Mr. MILLER of Florida asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)

   Mr. MILLER of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to comment on the recent GAO report on the Legal Services Corporation.

   It turned out that audits conducted by the Legal Services Corporation's Inspector General during 1998 revealed gross overstatement of cases in all five of the grantees examined and 200,000 cases were invalidated from audits on those five grantees alone.

   A subsequent GAO study on five more grantees was requested by several Members of Congress to determine the scope of this problem, and the results showed even more reason for concern.

   Besides invalidating at least 75,000 more cases, the GAO discovered that two of the five grantees, Puerto Rico and Chicago, had destroyed their client case files. In fact, the destruction of these files in Puerto Rico interfered with the ability of the GAO to conduct their audit. In Illinois, the destruction of the case files is against legal requirements set by the Illinois Supreme Court.

   The Legal Services Corporation itself claims to require their grantees to maintain their case files for at least 5 years, and that requirement is apparently violated.

   These reports are indeed very troubling concerning the operation of the Legal Services Corporation.

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