Committee on Ways & Means :: U.S. House of Representatives Testimony By Beverly Tran

Committee on Ways & Means :: U.S. House of Representatives

Hearings > Hearing on the Implementation of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act

Testimony By Beverly Tran, Statement

Statement of Beverly Tran

My name is Beverly Tran and I rise to this occasion to thank you for listening to the voice of the people, for it has been silenced for far too long. I share with you my sole concern with the implementation of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-351), and that is a lack of checks and balances.

Understanding the failure of implementation

Since 2001, I have been seeking the explanation of parental rights. More than just a statutory definition, I sought to understand its epistemology beyond the general consensus of social theory.

Why had there yet to be demonstrated a logically constructed, conceptual and operational formula for the determining factor of parental rights? My only recourse was to deconstruct the policies of child welfare. What I found was the existence of a well-founded methodology in determining parental rights, including its clear and concise evidentiary standard. The foundation of parental rights had been laid many centuries ago in property law, theorized through microeconomics.

The reason child welfare, specifically child protective services, foster care and adoption, in its current state, will never meet its end goal of functioning in the best interest of the child with the current implementation of this Act, is because no one understands what it is that is being protected. It is not the child, per say, but the future of the child to mature to be a tax-paying contributor to society.

No one understands that checks and balances of the child welfare system do not exist.

Child welfare as a frontier industry

Child welfare must not be understood as an industry that was constructed to maximize the profits of society through the best interests of the child, but it must be understood as a profit-maximizing industry that has schemes to increase its inputs, throughputs and outputs to ensure the economic sustainability of the public and private contractual arms of the states. Inputs are children who enter child welfare; throughputs are foster children; and, outputs are those children that exit the system, whether through reunification, adoption, maturation or attrition.

The Fostering Connections Act can be properly implemented, but only if this Congress understands that there needs to be a substantial change in its current operations by implementing checks and balances.

A lack of market regulation

Since foster care and adoption statutorily became a fully, publicly funded industry in 1974, it has operated strictly with federal funding and regulations, only in the form of financial penalties if the market shows signs of weakness, as states must meet and exceed the previous year’s federally mandated benchmark of the number of children under the auspices of the state to avoid financial penalties. The market is devoid of competition as the government is monopolistic with its statutory control and possesses sufficient authority to acquire the goods and procure the services, through the removal of the child by and through the removal of the legal rights to the grant of custody and guardianship.

Upon further examination, it will be demonstrated that it is the right of the state to grant the custody and guardianship, for it is the state that is the possessor of parental rights to the acquisition of goods.

Due to the lack of this understanding, federal and state policies have been improperly formatted and implemented. We, as a nation have witnessed the residual effects of a system devoid of oversight, and that is our financial system. Now, we are experiencing the second wave of fraud as our national leadership is fast asleep at the helm of the ship named health care.

Child welfare operates in a risk aversive market, as it intentionally never included the oversight mechanism of accountability and transparency; there are no checks and balances, hence, no incurred liabilities from error.

The mechanical error that I have identified is the systemic deficiency of checks and balances, embedded deep within the ethos of foster care and adoption. Checks and balances, essential elements in tripartite governments, must be readily recognized as accountability and transparency.

No accountability

If it has been determined that law and policy has been violated within the mechanical procedures of foster care and adoption, it is considered as an acceptable mistake, with a federally acceptable range of error of 0.10. This acceptable error is the destruction of a family.

Nothing is publicly reported, not even for the purposes of ameliorating future material and provisional violations of law and policy, particularly those committed under the color of law. This phenomenon is largely due to an inherent conflict of interest breed within the philosophical edifice of the child welfare system. Under the doctrine of parens patriae, the states attorney general have been granted the powers of parental rights through statutory declarations of commerce.

It thus becomes a contentious issue of intervention: “Do the states attorney general advocate to further a compelling governmental interest in the representation of the state and its contractual arms of child welfare, or do the states attorney general advocate for the citizen individuals who have been granted the gift of custody and guardianship? The child welfare system, in whole, incorporating all facets of the industry, functions on the fallacy of affirming the disjunct, that is, the government operates in good faith and there is no need to advocate for the citizen individuals who allegedly violated the granted gift of custody and guardianship.

Simply put, it is in the best interests of the child for government to invest in the profitable return of a future tax-paying, productive citizen, and not to advocate for the non-productive individual citizen, for that individual has violated the social compact in failing to contribute to the society as a whole, whether it be morally, intellectually, financially, or economically. Because of the belief government functions in good faith, there is no need to construct and implement a congruent system of checks and balances in child welfare. The crime of poverty has been justified.

Public disenfranchisement

Where public access and voter participation into the mechanical process of this market are the checks, the general public is disenfranchised because child welfare law and policies are neither put up for public discussion nor full disclosure. Even more so, a targeted population is specifically disenfranchised because children are not allowed the right to vote.

Child welfare protects and preserves itself by importing policies to obviate transparency and accountability, whereby, it has manufactured obfuscatory policies to terminate parental rights of the granted gift of custody and guardianship to “cloak” the industry of abuse and neglect.

That "cloak", for which I reference, is laced with public policies to create the tapestry of public perceptions, to conceal the inner workings of the industry of child welfare. This cloak is impenetrable to empirical analysis, as it is hermetically sealed by the Freedom of Information Act, and the institutionalized belief that sealed information of child welfare policies furthers a compelling governmental interest. That compelling governmental interest is the general welfare of the public, now and in the future.

When the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention Treatment Act[i] was designed, a fatal flaw was inculcated into 1997 Adoption Safe Families Act, and its subsequent legislative actions. I speak again of the lack of checks and balances. This philosophical tenet is embedded deep within core of public belief, woven into the historical fabric of society and engrained into the academic discipline of policy analysis, where nothing could be of the contrary. Initial funding streams from Social Security Title I, Title II, Title IV-A, B, D and E, Title V and Medicaid Targeted Case Management (TCM), as well as others, were created to flow down to the states to care for abused and neglected children who were qualified as impoverished under the means test of Title IV-A under the Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Simply put, poverty is codified as abuse and neglect and the discipline of Social Work has generated the only literature of analysis, which has been mostly qualitative.

No transparency

Under the Eleventh Amendment of the United States Constitution, states possess sovereign immunity from prosecution of wrongdoing by the federal government. Immunity is then draped to circumvent accountability and transparency in non-reporting/non-disclosure through Freedom Of Information Act exceptions. Basically, anything dealing with errors in child welfare cases, more intuitively recognized as fraud, waste and abuse, is kept from the public for the protection of the child, justifying the lack of need for exclusionary databases and reporting protocol.

Due to the lack of transparency, federal and state policies have been improperly formatted and implemented. We, as a nation have witnessed the residual effects of a system devoid of oversight, and that is our financial system. Now, we are experiencing the second wave of attack on our nation’s economic security as our national leadership have been fast asleep at the helm of the ship named health care. The monster named Medicaid fraud has victoriously raised its ugly head, with no one to battle, until now.

Sunshine initiatives

I take this time to honor a great man, former U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for personally inspiring me to continue my work to end Medicaid fraud in child welfare. He is the first leader to listen and speak out on the need for investigation on the levels of political corruption, fraud, waste and abuse in the U.S. Administration for Children and Families through the early initiatives of the Health Care Fraud Enforcement Task Force (H.E.A.T.)

I take this time to thank the dedication of U.S. Attorney Eric H. Holder, Jr., U.S. DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. DHHS Inspector General Daniel R. Levinson for listening to the people and developing the Strike Forces to end Medicare fraud in child welfare.

As it stands, there is no system of “checks and balances” to maintain the integrity of operations and best interests for all stakeholders involved in the implementation of this Act. The amount of power and money involved in child welfare is massive, involving multiple funding streams of Social Security and Medicaid, yet pails to the levels of fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars. Poverty is codified as the crime of abuse and neglect for eligibility of a child entering foster care is strictly based on being impoverished. Hence, as poverty increases so shall the number of child removals to foster care. Billions of dollars of federal fraud were found through only cursory audits conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) and U.S. Department of Justice, but this shall be no longer for the people have been heard.

The OIG has identified a number of state financing arrangements and other revenue-maximization tactics that inappropriately increase Federal Medicaid payments to States. Children are being double-billed, provided for unnecessary medical services and phantom programs are funded that bill fictitious children and services. This is what is called fraud, or more intuitively, federal false claims. Every year, lawyers across the nation are settling an increased number of lawsuits against states, child placing agencies and foster parents to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, all because the nation has not had the opportunity to be exposed to the child welfare industry for what it is: a market.

U.S. DHHS funded organization, Council On Accreditation, has nothing to do with children and families as they only lobby for their due-paying, state contracted, private agencies. An accreditation organization is not supposed to be established to advocate for transgressors of law, but it does.

It is time to hold these privatized child placing agencies to the same standards they hold the guardians of children. If the agencies possess the empowering authority to remove children and advocate termination of parental rights, then, in the same wielding of justice, the state should possess the empowering authority to remove licenses and terminate contractual relationships, and effectuate contractual debarment with these child placing agencies. The regulatory mechanism of the OIG exclusion database is in place but is not utilized.

Implementation recommendations

Improve regulation

As these child welfare programs function devoid of any accountability, the first instance of oversight would be to effectuate financial sanctions and contractual debarment with privatized agencies through the state licensing agencies. Privatized agencies operate as not-for-profit, therefore excluding them from external audits. Typically, child placing agencies self-report on an honor system because it is too costly for a state to retain the manpower and resources to properly ensure that each entity is in compliance with the requirements or receiving federal funds pursuant to the Office of Management and Budget Circular A-133. It becomes more cost-effective for a state to turn its head and allow fraudulent billing to occur than to enforce regulation.

The largest federally funded component of child welfare is not the Social Security Title IV-E, as everyone would like to believe, it is Medicaid: Targeted Case Management and Optional Targeted Case Management. States need to decrease its percentage in the federal formula for Medicaid funding. Right now it is approximately 50%. It becomes more cost effective for a state to continue sinking money into a dysfunctional child welfare system than come into federal compliance with its operations, such as enforcing existing accountability statutes in dealing with fraud. Assumption may be formulated that some states use a portion of the Federal Funding Percentage to meet its State Funding Percentage. This can only be disproved with regulation.

Encourage State Medicaid Fraud Units to prosecute and recover

State Medicaid Fraud Units need to finally step up to the plate and start aggressively going after Medicaid fraud in child welfare. If the Attorney General is ever able to release himself from the statutory constraint of only advocating for transgressors of law, the recovery percentage of the federal portions of the fraud would be situated at 10%, bringing back in billions of lost funds from over the past few years and demonstrating exemplary standards to deter future fraudulent transgressions.

These state units can be encouraged to work with its citizens, as they may be the eyes and ears of regulation through public awareness campaigns, whistleblower litigations, and state Medicaid False Claims statutes. As many abuse and neglect programs are riddled with fraudulent billing and poor or falsely generated performance reports, the only way of verifying this is to listen to the people.

Promote the funding of public legal defense and grievance databases

Unfortunately, one of the few ways a family can access medical, social, psychological services for children today is through a court classification of abuse and neglect. Social welfare assistance programs have been cut, but the only federal funding streams that has opened up to provide for those who need help has been foster care. It has come to the point where there are no other options.

A blueprint for accountability and transparency was never conceived in child welfare. When a social system has a zero error rating in decisions to remove children and/or terminate parental rights, no databases of grievances, sanctions, fines, contractual debarment, including violations of material provisions of law and policy, a red flag should immediately be raised. There is a greater possibility of being not found of murder than it is being not found guilty of child abuse and neglect, as the jurisprudence of dependency courts are unparallel to traditional courts, the adjudication standard being guilty, until proven innocent.

It is my hope that this Congress will direct a portion of this funding to legal defense and for the construction of a grievance database, similar to what is called for in the U.N. Intercountry Adoption Treaty to foster connections between the people, the U.S. DHHS OIG and U.S. DOJ AG to stop Medicaid fraud in child welfare.

Reinstatement of parental rights

If a system is to be viewed as balanced, there is always a counter-balance. This would be the reinstatement of parental rights. Currently, there are four states, which have some form of limited exceptions to reinstatements. Technology has removed the barrier of contact and time. In light of the crux of my position on Medicaid fraud, there does exist improper and unnecessary removals of children and termination of parental rights, by what is considered as being legally kidnapped. There are times where it may take an individual more than 12 months to obtain the help needed to succeed in life. We must understand the severance of a legacy has not proven to be the best means in dealing with the hardships of others. Let us take the time to reunite these children with the degrees of consanguinity and affinity so they may have a chance to connect to a profitable and successful future for their own best interests.

With sincerity and serenity,

Beverly Tran