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Company prized speed in closing of abuse cases
By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer PINELLAS PARK -- For three months, George Fatolitis worked as a child abuse investigator in Lake County, a two-hour drive from his Palm Harbor home. He says his bosses gave him a special incentive: Finish enough cases and we'll let you go home for the weekend. If he didn't meet his "quota" of seven to nine cases, Fatolitis said, he wasn't allowed to return home Friday night without special permission. Fatolitis and other former employees of the Florida Task Force to Protect Abused and Neglected Children say they were given quotas of cases they had to finish investigating by the end of their work week. "They weren't concerned about child protection itself," said Fatolitis, who said he was fired by the Task Force after being accused of falsifying records, a charge he denies. "They wanted to produce their quota. It was really a bad situation because they were putting a lot of children at risk." Now, the Pinellas Park-based Task Force faces an investigation by the state to find out if harried employees falsified records in their rush to close cases. The Task Force was hired in the summer of 2000 by the state Department of Children and Families to investigate child abuse cases that have lingered too long. The Task Force has had $6-million in contracts for its work around the state, including Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties. Tracy Loomis, vice president and executive director of the Task Force, said her agency puts child safety at the forefront and sets reasonable goals for the number of cases investigators should complete, not hard-and-fast quotas. "This company was formed purely for the safety of the children," said Bob Swyers, the comptroller. A review of the company's operations shows: The agency hired an employee who was fired from the Department of Children and Families and another who had been accused of falsifying information, Loomis acknowledged. The first was fired from DCF because of his inadequacies as a supervisor, and has worked for the Task Force only in a non-supervisory position. Loomis said the second employee voluntarily quit the Task Force after the staff learned of the falsification allegation. One worker, Tracy Shoemaker, said she was hired to type reports and make phone calls, but found herself writing evaluations of whether abused and neglected children should stay in their homes -- even though she never visited these children or their families, and was not trained as an investigator. "It made me feel uncomfortable, but (supervisors) kept reassuring me," she said. Loomis said Shoemaker's role was to type information she had learned in phone calls about a child's safety, then forward it to a trained investigator. A DCF review of 16 files last month in Martin, St. Lucie, Okeechobee and Indian River counties found numerous problems. None of the cases had been assessed within 24 hours; 10 contained no evidence that caseworkers completed face-to-face interviews; and 12 failed to document the risk level assigned to each child, as required in the contract. The department demanded a corrective plan because of the "serious nature of the deficiencies." Loomis said the DCF staff used a more stringent standard than it should have when evaluating its work. One former Task Force employee has said co-workers, under pressure from high workloads, sometimes fabricated information. Sara Bennett-Nelson said in an interview she knew of one case in which a worker who doesn't speak Spanish said she had interviewed a Spanish-speaking family. The investigation comes at an awkward time for the Department of Children and Families, which only recently was basking in the glow of a generally positive legislative report that noted how it had slashed its backlog of child abuse cases from 51,338 in January 2001 to 30,108 last month. For their part, staff members of the Task Force say they're confused by the sudden investigation, because they demand high-quality work and know of no falsifications. Loomis said it makes sense to set numerical goals for caseworkers, because the state sets its own goals on how many cases the Task Force should handle. Because backlogged cases have been partly investigated, they often can be handled more quickly than a new case, she said. Former investigator Ed Shoemaker, Tonya Shoemaker's husband, countered: "They can say anything they want to, but the fact was the emphasis was how many you have closed." -- Curtis Krueger can be reached at krueger@sptimes.com or by calling (727) 893-8232.
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From the Times North Pinellas desks |
