Each year, legal services programs receiving federal taxpayer money
from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) are required to submit reports
to LSC detailing their numbers of open and closed cases for the previous
year. These statistics are ultimately used by LSC to pitch Congress
for increased funding--for example, LSC originally claimed to Congress
that federally funded legal services programs handled 1.9 million cases
in 1997. But, as it turns out, that number is almost certainly wildly
exaggerated. The LSC Office of Inspector General has performed several
audits of legal services programs nationwide detailing how the programs
sent case statistics that greatly overcounted the number of cases handled--in
some instances by more than 300 percent! (Note: these audit
reports can be found online at http://oig.lsc.gov/reports/)
California
The Legal Aid Society of San Diego (LASSD), which received over $3 million
in federal funding through LSC in 1997, overstated the number of cases
that it closed that year by 68 percent in the grant activity report that
it filed with LSC. LASSD reported that it had closed 32,304 cases
in 1997, but an audit conducted by the LSC Office of Inspector General
determined that 22,025 of those cases were either entirely non-existent
or wrongly reported as ‘cases’ under LSC guidelines. Over 14,000
of these supposed ‘cases’ consisted of nothing more than telephone calls
to LASSD that resulted in referrals to another agencies.
Source: LSC Office of Inspector
General Review of Case Statistics Report AU-99-012, March 1999.
Florida
Legal Services of Greater Miami (LSGM), a recipient of $4.4 million from LSC in 1997, exaggerated by a whopping 315 percent the number of cases it had closed that year in its grant activity report filed with LSC. A November 1998 audit of LSGM by the LSC Office of Inspector General showed that only 4,943 of the 20,487 cases counted by LSGM as closed in 1997 were qualified to be counted as such. The vast majority of the invalid ‘cases’ turned out to be telephone calls and walk-in contacts where the individuals were not even accepted as LSGM clients nor provided with any legal services.
Source: LSC Office of Inspector
General Review of Case Statistics Report AU99-013, March 1999
Illinois
Prairie State Legal Services (PSLS) of Rockford, Illinois, which received $4.1 million in LSC funding in 1997, was found to have overstated its cases statistics in its 1997 grant activity report to the LSC. An audit by the LSC Inspector General’s office determined that, among other deficiencies, PSLS overstated the number of cases that remained open at the end of 1997 by nineteen percent. 890 out of 4686 cases claimed to be ‘open’ turned out to have been resolved in some fashion. Most disturbingly, the reason cited by the audit report for this discrepancy was that PSLS simply did not close the cases “in a timely manner.” In other words, PSLS appears to have little idea what is going on with its cases! The audit of PSLS also uncovered other serious deficiencies, including case files that lacked signed retainer agreements and the citizenship attestation forms used to verify that the legal services clients are U.S. citizens.
Source: LSC Office of Inspector General Review of Case Statistics Report AU99-014, May 1999.