Area's Most Expensive Day Care? Centro Familia Misplaces A Million

Creative Accountability is sort of like Creative Accounting.

I strongly expect to see some astonishing exercises in Creative Accountability in MoCo politics this week and month.

In a response to a remark by "Sleepless in Slumburbia to my blog entry regarding MPW Goes Partisan: Ben Kramer, Doug Duncan Slammed, "Sleepless" points out that the only way some people can stand to be Maryland Liberals is to be on drugs, and I responded with an unfortunately overlong post in which I demonstrate that voting for anyone put forward by the MoCo Party Machine is in the same moral/ethical position as a woman taking medication to deal with the depression caused by refusing to leave her abusive husband.

As over-the-top (or entirely "on point") as that might be, Epic Madness and Incompetence might explain what was observed by the Washington Post writer in John Kelly's Washington:

Here was the sentence that made me do a doubletake: "Centro Familia offers an early childhood program to about 30 preschoolers and has trained more than 300 in-home child care providers who focus on Latino children who otherwise might lack sufficient preparation to enter elementary school." Good work, I'm sure, but how much can that cost? Thirty kids, $900,000. What's that? Thirty-thousand bucks per kid? That would improve my early childhood. (And late adulthood.)

Wow, that's nearly a million dollars, and at $30,000 per kid, that ought to be some serious pre-school. What are we talking about in terms of performance, guaranteed graduate of the International Baccalaureate Program by age seven? Kids with IQ of 800 gajillion? Read and write forty languages and can do integral calculus in simultaneous sets of quantum superposition in their heads all while petting Schrodinger's Cat with a cyclotron they built themselves out of an old tire-balancer?

Well, the MoCo Office of Inspector General doesn't seem to think so (PDF). It gets thicker, of course, the deeper you wade into it, as is true of any cesspool.

Strangely enough, this is fairly old news, and why it's seeing the light of day right as Nancy Navarro of the School Board winds up for her second run for office only a year after the last one, we can't tell you.

What we can tell you is what you'll read if you download and read the letter from the Inspector General, linked to above. More or less, the Department of Health and Human Services ("DHHS") was negligent in its oversight and monitoring of payments to the "Institute for Family Development" which is noted parenthetically as "Centro Familia".

A couple of letterheads into the stack of documents, we see:

[...] With the exception of one $5,000 amount billed in June 2007 for program evaluation fees in conjunction with FY2007 Contract #664433019-AA (PO #7644330114)), Centro Familia representives could not provide the [Office of Inspector General] with documentation to substantiate specific payroll and operate expenses included on the approximately 70 monthly invoices included in our review. In addition, OIG testing of selected accounting records and supporting documentation provided by Centro Familia disclosed inconsistencies, errors, and discrepancies that, to date, have not been resolved.

But even more interesting is something that isn't at all limited to Centro Familia. In a letter dated February 13, 2009, from Uma S. Ahluwalia (Director, DHHS) to Thomas J Dagley, the Inspector General, we discover:

[...] Our contract monitors are program based and their primary focus has often been on overseeing the quality of the services provided to our customers and clients. Strengthening our fiscal and administrative oversight of contracts is essential to assuring comprehensive contract monitoring. In addition, many of our vendors are also our non-profit collaborators and partners [italics mine -thardman]. We need to work with them to assure they are fully educated on the County's Procurement regulations and procedures while respecting and preserving our collaborative relationship.

Given the volume and complexity of our contracts, these are significant challenges. [...]

Now, leaving aside the use of the word "collaborators" -- which of course has a very strong negative association to the collaborators in WWII -- I find it a little baffling to hear that the County is making use of "non-profit" organizations who might have been playing fast and loose with the rules of the County's Procurement divisions. Or perhaps they weren't playing fast and loose with the Procurement regulations... DHHS doesn't seem to know, and presumably nobody else does, either. Only since July 2008 has attendance at course covering Contract Monitoring been required, and as of March 2009 there will be a DHHS Contract Monitoring Review Committee.

I expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg here, and that a can of worms has been opened up that will be wriggling long after the Special Elections are over.

Who knows; I remember that for some years one of the County's contractors was, probably without oversight, getting away with driving vanloads of autistic adults to Aspen Hill Local Park back around 2003-2004 or so so, and herding them around the parking lot -- sometimes with sticks -- and billing who-knows how much money for this "care". I wonder what Centro Familia's "Institute for Family Development" was doing with their charges, assuming that they had any.