Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston
Globe
June 26, 1999, Saturday ,City Edition
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A6
LENGTH: 454 words
HEADLINE: US
audit finds double-counting in biggest legal-aid programs
BYLINE: By Karen Gullo, Associated Press
BODY:
WASHINGTON - Two months
after the Legal Services Corp. conceded that a few regional
offices overstated their workloads, government auditors found that the five
largest offices also reported 75,000 cases they could not document.
The
Baltimore and New York City offices of the federal program, which provides free
legal help to low-income Americans, reported twice as many legal cases as they
should have, according to a General Accounting Office draft report released to
lawmakers yesterday.
Congress uses case reports when deciding how much
money the agency should receive. Republican critics of Legal Services said the
GAO report shows case-reporting problems are more serious than the agency
initially suggested. "The fact that the GAO has confirmed our suspicions of the
significance and pervasiveness of the problem underscores the need to question
whether they were hiding this from Congress," said Representative Tom Latham,
Republican in Iowa, a member of the House Appropriations subcommittee that
oversees Legal Services.
Agency officials said that even with the new
findings, the number of overstated cases is small compared to the total number
of poor people - more than 1.7 million - who have been helped. They denied that
the agency was hiding anything and said that case reporting practices have been
changed to correct the problem.
Legal Services affiliates in Baltimore,
Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Puerto Rico overstated the number of cases
they handled by 75,000 in 1997, according to a summary of the GAO report.
That represents one-third of the 221,000 cases that the groups
said they handled. Cases were double-counted, cases that should have been closed
were counted as open, and cases paid for from nonfederal sources were included
with the federal count, the summary said.
The GAO also found that some
programs had no records to verify their clients' income and citizenship
eligibility. Such documentation is required.
The agency is doing an
internal review of case-reporting problems and is investigating whether any
provided legal aid to ineligible clients, said John McKay, Legal Services
president.
"LSC is completely committed to ensuring all congressional
restrictions and laws are followed," McKay said in a statement.
Last
year Legal Services handed out $283 million in federal money to
about 260 local affiliates to finance legal help for low-income Americans with
civil cases such as tenant problems or court protection from domestic violence.
Republican lawmakers asked the GAO to look into Legal Service's
case reporting after The Associated Press reported in April that the agency
overstated tens of thousands of cases handled in 1997.
LOAD-DATE: June 29, 1999 
