Copyright 1999 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
St.
Louis Post-Dispatch
June 26, 1999, Saturday, FIVE STAR LIFT
EDITION
SECTION: NEWS, Pg. 2
LENGTH: 353 words
HEADLINE:
LEGAL AID OFFICES HANDLED FEWER CASES THAN CLAIMED, REPORT SAYS
BYLINE: The Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
* Congress uses the case-reporting figures when deciding how much
money the agency should receive.
Five federally funded nonprofit groups
that provide free legal services for the poor overstated the cases they handled
by one-third in 1997, government investigators have concluded.
Legal Services Corp.'s five largest regional affiliates
reported 221 ,000 cases, about 75,000 more than they could document, according
to a draft report by the General Accounting Office, an investigative and
auditing arm of Congress. The GAO said the five programs - in Baltimore,
Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Puerto Rico - had "substantial errors" in the
number of reported cases, including double-counting cases, counting cases that
should have been closed as open, and counting cases that were funded by
nonfederal sources, according to a summary of the report obtained by The
Associated Press.
Republican lawmakers asked the GAO to look into
case-reporting practices after The Associated Press reported in April that the
agency ov erstated tens of thousands of cases handled in 1997.
Legal Services reported serving 1.93 million clients in 1997.
Congress uses the case-reporting figures when deciding how much money
the agency should receive. Last year Legal Services handed out $ 283 million in
taxpayer money to about 260 local affiliates, which provide free legal
assistance to low-income Americans who need help with civil cases such as
evictions or court protection from domestic violence.
Agency officials
said the problems were caused by bookkeeping errors that have been corrected and
that the agency did not intentionally mislead Congress.
"We are working
with every single program to get the numbers right," said Mauricio Vivero, a
Legal Services Corp. spokesman.
Rep. Tom Latham,
R-Iowa, who requested the GAO report, said the new findings were troubling.
"The fact that the GAO confirmed our suspicions of the significance and
pervasiveness of the problem only underscores the need to question the
leadership of the LSC and whether they were hiding this from Congress," said
Latham.
LOAD-DATE: July 14, 1999
