In a September 20 follow-up report to its June 25, 1999 report detailing case reporting errors at five Legal Services Corporation (LSC) grantees, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has concluded that substantial problems remain in the system by which LSC grantees report the amount of cases they handle each year. These case-counting figures are important because they are used by Congress as a performance review tool to help determine annual funding for the LSC, which is charged with funding to organizations that provide legal help to the poor.
Earlier this year, LSC’s case reporting system became embroiled in scandal when the Associated Press reported on April 8 that LSC grantees had substantially overcounted the number of cases they handled for 1997. It was later publicly revealed that LSC had known of the overcounting problem during the 1998 congressional appropriations process but had not revealed to Congress that the 1997 numbers it had supplied were inaccurate. Following this revelation, several members of Congress asked the GAO to conduct an independent audit of the case reporting system. GAO’s June 25 report looked at five of the largest LSC grantees and found that all of them had significantly overcounted the number of cases handled in 1997. During the 1999 appropriations process, LSC represented to Congress that it had instituted new case reporting procedures that would ensure more accurate case numbers. GAO was asked to conduct a second study to determine whether LSC’s reforms are working.
Significantly, the latest GAO report casts doubt on the accuracy of LSC’s process of having grantees conduct their own inspections of case data and certifying the results. LSC reported to GAO that it concluded from the self-inspection process that the total number of cases handled by LSC grantees in 1998 was 1.1 million--down sharply from the 1.5 million figure reported erroneously to Congress for 1997. However, based on concerns over a lack of consistent reporting procedures, the GAO found itself unable to determine whether even this reduced figure was accurate. According to the GAO report, “LSC does not know how well grantees conducted the self-inspection process, nor how accurate the results are.”
Quite simply, it appears that LSC is patently unable to control and monitor
the activities of the lawyers to whom it gives millions of taxpayer dollars.
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