Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston
Globe
April 8, 1999, Thursday ,City Edition
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A16
LENGTH: 554 words
HEADLINE:
Legal aid service for poor hit on data
BYLINE: By Karen
Gullo, Associated Press
BODY:
WASHINGTON - The federally funded agency that provides free legal aid for poor
Americans overstated the number of cases it handled in 1997 by tens of
thousands, drawing the ire of lawmakers who rely on the figures to decide how
much money to give the program.
Legal Services Corp., a
target of Republican budget cuts, says it has cleared up local bookkeeping
errors. As a result it expects to report 200,000 fewer cases to Congress for
1998, a 10 percent drop from the previous year's inflated figure. The House
majority leader, Dick Armey of Texas, a longtime critic, called the overcounting
"the grossest example of Washington bureaucrats abusing hard-earned taxpayer
money."
The Legal Services president, John McKay, acknowledged that the
1997 count was "slightly off," and that it will be adjusted in hindsight. But he
says the agency was not intentionally misleading.
"It's not significant
in terms of overall cases and services we are providing," said McKay, a
Republican who was elected by the board two years ago. "If anything, we're
underreporting the services we provide."
The agency did not have enough
information to alert Congress that there was a problem until just two months
ago, officials said.
Legal Services reported serving 1.93 million
clients in 1997. But a review of five of the agency's 269 regional programs
found officials had overstated their caseload by at least 90,000.
As a
result of improved counting methods, the agency expects to report 1.73 million
cases for 1998.
Reports by Legal Services' inspector general, the
agency's internal watchdog, and other documents provide a more detailed picture.
Documents showed problems in at least five regional programs. They
included telephone calls from people who did not get legal help or were
ineligible for assistance that were reported as new cases, cases that were
double-counted and counting of outdated cases.
A group in Lakeland,
Fla., serving rural areas reported 44,993 new cases - eight times the 5,500
valid cases it worked, officials said. Peter Helwig, executive director,
attributed most of the problems to a computer error.
About 70 percent of
nearly 73,000 closed cases recorded by regional programs in San Francisco, San
Diego, Miami, and northern Virginia, were not valid, officials found.
For example, the Legal Aid Society of San Diego misreported more than
14,000 telephone calls as cases, an audit found. The San Diego executive
director, Gregory Knoll, said, however, that "every caller has their problem
assessed" even if they don't receive legal advice.
Legal Services, a
nonprofit corporation, provides federal grants to local agencies that provide
legal assistance to low-income Americans who need help with civil cases such as
tenant problems or court protection from domestic violence. Congress slashed the
program's money by 30 percent in 1996.
Legal Services handed out
$283 million taxpayer money to local programs last year, and
its funding was increased to $300 million in 1999.
The
extent of overcounting at Legal Services' outlets nationwide is unclear. The
agency is in the process of checking a handful of the other 269 programs that
received funding in 1997, and overcounting elsewhere is less severe, Legal
Services inspector general Edouard Quatrevaux said.
LOAD-DATE: April 08, 1999 
