{"id":70,"date":"2006-02-08T19:24:03","date_gmt":"2006-02-09T01:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/fraudfiles\/?p=70"},"modified":"2012-06-05T21:58:46","modified_gmt":"2012-06-06T02:58:46","slug":"milwaukee-county-child-welfare-system-contractor-reimbursements-found-to-be-inappropriate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/milwaukee-county-child-welfare-system-contractor-reimbursements-found-to-be-inappropriate\/","title":{"rendered":"Milwaukee County Child Welfare System Contractor Reimbursements Found to be Inappropriate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An audit of the Milwaukee County Child Welfare system was completed by state auditors at the direction of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. The audit found almost $700,000 of questionable and unallowable costs.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"SmBody\">The Child Welfare system had 153 full-time employees in June 2005, while outside contractors had about 500 staff members to provide the bulk of the services. From January 2001 through June 2005, the program spent a total of $493.7 million. In 2004 alone, program expenditures totaled $103 million.<!--more--><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"SmBody\">The costs charged to the program by nine contractors in 2004 were tested by auditors. The auditors found $677,694 in unallowable and questionable costs charged by six of the contractors.<\/p>\n<p>1,409 transactions totaling $2.8 million were tested, with selection for testing based upon the size of the transaction and the vendor involved. The unallowable and questionable costs total $136,090, plus a duplicate payment to a contractor in the amount of $541,604.<\/p>\n<p>The questionable costs include the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>items not supported with receipts ($1,025)<\/li>\n<li>a penalty charged by a telecommunications company for early termination of a contract ($3,085)<\/li>\n<li>bank fees ($5,789)<\/li>\n<li>an excessive severance package for an executive ($46,214)<\/li>\n<li>legal fees unrelated to child welfare programs ($32,971)<\/li>\n<li>promotional items distributed to employees, such as pens, mugs, jackets, etc. ($6,253)<\/li>\n<li>gift cards given to employees or with no receipts ($12,670)<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;.and more<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In case you didn&#8217;t do the math, $136,090 in inappropriate charges (excluding the larger amount as we&#8217;ll assume it was a mistake) represents 4.9% of the $2.8 million in transactions that were tested. Apply that to just the $103 million spent by the Child Welfare system in 2004, and you&#8217;ve got <strong>an estimated $5 million of (fraud?) problems per year<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Read the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.legis.state.wi.us\/lab\/\">full text of the audit<\/a>.<br \/>\n<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.legis.state.wi.us\/lab\/\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An audit of the Milwaukee County Child Welfare system was completed by state auditors at the direction of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. The audit found almost $700,000 of questionable and unallowable costs. The Child Welfare system had 153 full-time [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[872],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-fraud"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-18","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}