Each year, legal services programs receiving federal taxpayer money from the
Legal Services Corporation (LSC) are required to submit reports to LSC detailing
their numbers of open and closed cases for the previous year. These
statistics are ultimately used by LSC to pitch Congress for increased
funding--for example, LSC originally claimed to Congress that federally funded
legal services programs handled 1.9 million cases in 1997. But, as it
turns out, that number is almost certainly wildly exaggerated. The LSC
Office of Inspector General has performed several audits of legal services
programs nationwide detailing how the programs sent case statistics that greatly
overcounted the number of cases handled--in some instances by more than 300
percent! (Note: these audit reports can be found online at
http://oig.lsc.gov/reports/)
California
The Legal Aid Society of San Diego (LASSD), which received over $3 million in
federal funding through LSC in 1997, overstated the number of cases that it
closed that year by 68 percent in the grant activity report that it filed with
LSC. LASSD reported that it had closed 32,304 cases in 1997, but an audit
conducted by the LSC Office of Inspector General determined that 22,025 of those
cases were either entirely non-existent or wrongly reported as ‘cases’ under LSC
guidelines. Over 14,000 of these supposed ‘cases’ consisted of nothing
more than telephone calls to LASSD that resulted in referrals to another
agencies.
Source: LSC
Office of Inspector General Review of Case Statistics Report AU-99-012, March
1999.
Florida
Legal Services of Greater Miami (LSGM), a recipient of $4.4 million from LSC in 1997, exaggerated by a whopping 315 percent the number of cases it had closed that year in its grant activity report filed with LSC. A November 1998 audit of LSGM by the LSC Office of Inspector General showed that only 4,943 of the 20,487 cases counted by LSGM as closed in 1997 were qualified to be counted as such. The vast majority of the invalid ‘cases’ turned out to be telephone calls and walk-in contacts where the individuals were not even accepted as LSGM clients nor provided with any legal services.
Source: LSC Office of Inspector General
Review of Case Statistics Report AU99-013, March 1999
Illinois
Prairie State Legal Services (PSLS) of Rockford, Illinois, which received $4.1 million in LSC funding in 1997, was found to have overstated its cases statistics in its 1997 grant activity report to the LSC. An audit by the LSC Inspector General’s office determined that, among other deficiencies, PSLS overstated the number of cases that remained open at the end of 1997 by nineteen percent. 890 out of 4686 cases claimed to be ‘open’ turned out to have been resolved in some fashion. Most disturbingly, the reason cited by the audit report for this discrepancy was that PSLS simply did not close the cases “in a timely manner.” In other words, PSLS appears to have little idea what is going on with its cases! The audit of PSLS also uncovered other serious deficiencies, including case files that lacked signed retainer agreements and the citizenship attestation forms used to verify that the legal services clients are U.S. citizens.
Source: LSC Office of Inspector General Review of Case Statistics Report AU99-014, May 1999.