At a March 3 hearing concerning FY 2000 funding for the controversial Legal Services Corporation (LSC) before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies, LSC was strongly criticized for failing to tell Congress about record keeping snafus that may have grossly distorted the LSC's own statistics about the number of cases handled by federally funded legal services programs. These statistics have been used by LSC in the past to argue for annual funding increases. The Chairman of the Subcommittee, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY), was also critical of LSC asking for a substantial FY2000 funding increase tied to initiatives to help victims of domestic violence, when Congress has already appropriated millions of dollars to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in grants for similar programs available to legal services groups that have gone unclaimed.
LSC officials were before the Subcommittee requesting a $40 million increase over the $300 million given to LSC by Congress for FY 1999. That appropriation itself represented a substantial $17 million increase over the previous year.
In his statement to the Subcommittee, LSC President John McKay requested over $17 million in new funding for "Domestic Violence/Unmet Legal Needs of Children Initiatives." Although McKay claimed in his statement that significant amounts of the new funding would go towards hiring additional lawyers to handle domestic abuse and child welfare cases, Chairman Rogers noted that many of the local initiatives touted by McKay, such as establishing a "victim support group" and creating a "delinquincy prevention program," are really the type of work handled by social workers, rather than the legal work for which LSC was created to provide funding. Rogers criticized LSC for proposing funding for such social work initiatives, since Congress has already appropriated money for other agencies to handle these kinds of programs under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). In addition, Rogers questioned the need to fund this initiative because VAWA also has grants that legal services programs could apply to DOJ for to use for domestic abuse cases, much of which is still unclaimed.
The other main 'initiative' for which LSC has requested increased funding is a $13 million program designed to provide better service to legal services clients through the use of high technology. Although the initiative is supposedly designed primarily to streamline the client intake process for legal services providers, some aspects of this initiative border on the ridiculous: LSC proposes to use part of this money to provide legal information for the poor on the internet, despite the rather obvious fact that most potential legal services clients have little or no access to the computers necessary to reach the internet!
On the issue of misleading LSC statistics, Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) severely chastized LSC officials at the hearing for failing to notify Congress when LSC had reason to believe that information it had presented to Congress was incorrect. Specifically, Rep. Latham charged that LSC may have known as early as July, 1998, while the FY 1999 appropriation was still pending, that local legal services providers were seriously overcounting the number of cases that they handled in reports to LSC. LSC has touted these high figures, totalling over a million cases annually, as proof that federal funding help meets the legal needs of many poor people. At the hearing, however, LSC Inspector General Ed Quatreveaux conceded that Legal Services of Northern Virginia had overcounted its cases for 1997 by 13,000 and that an unspecified program still under investigation had overcounted by 30,000 cases out of a total of 60,000 reported by that program. Considering that there are over 260 legal services programs receiving grants from LSC, it is easy to see how these numbers, if consistent with other programs, could add up to a gross exaggeration of the number of cases handled by LSC grantees. In a parting comment, Chaiman Rogers promised that Congress would deal very severely with LSC or the local programs if it turns out they are withholding information from Congress.
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