Foster Program Scams - NY TIMES

This is real criminal activity...

NEW YORK: Taken as a young child from her drug-abusing mother, the girl had lived in one foster home after another. Now, at 16, she saw the day approaching when she would become an adult and be sent off to make a life on her own.

She desperately wanted to be ready, and one last bit of help seemed to be at hand. New York City had paid her foster care agency, a sprawling organization called Miracle Makers, hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for workshops in which trained professionals would teach teenagers like her — who often end up jobless, homeless or in jail — the practical skills they needed to survive. There was a catch The workshops did not exist.

The girl complained in 2003, and the Manhattan Family Court referee hearing her case eventually discovered that Miracle Makers had not offered the classes for about a year and a half. Yet city officials had continued to pay, after the agency assured them that a substitute program was in place, even though it did not provide the expert training. All told, the city paid about $400,000 for a program that the court referee and others suggested was largely a sham.

During a hearing in October 2003, a Manhattan Family Court referee, Marva Burnett, learned that the girl was not receiving any of the classes — on finding a job, handling money and staying sexually safe — that Miracle Makers had provided in the past. A caseworker said the agency had suspended them.

How long ago? Referee Burnett asked.

“I cannot give you a date,” the caseworker replied.

The referee persisted: “How many months? How many weeks? How many days?”

She investigated in a series of hearings, and learned that Miracle Makers had not held the workshops for at least a year and a half. In February 2005, two years after the girl first complained, Referee Burnett ruled that she did not believe the agency’s backdated paperwork, or its testimony. She directed Children’s Services to investigate “to see if any fraud took place.”

Children’s Services said it referred the matter to the city’s Department of Investigation. But that agency says it never received any referral, and can find no evidence it was ever sent.

There was no investigation.

NY TIMES