Dear Gov.-Elect Markell — People’s Settlement Needs Tough Love
Dear Governor-Elect Markell:
While we are delighted that you will be taking the reigns of the government here in Delaware, we certainly understand that you begin governing with some of the greatest challenges of many generations.
Certainly, you don’t need any more problems to fix, but the People’s Settlement needs attention, and quickly. The Office of Auditor of Accounts released the first report. According to this report:
This report specifically addresses the allegation that the Executive Director diverted State funds, which were earmarked for specific grants and programs, to unauthorized programs.
There will be more reports of other allegations, but review of this report will detail for you the complete incompetence of the Executive Director and the Board of Directors of this once venerable organization. Just the responses by the PSA claiming no knowledge of an Auditor’s data request ought to be enough to see that the PSA Board has no idea what is going on at their organization. This report details contract compliance violations as well as a real lack of urgency on behalf of this Board to ensure that they are aggressively serving the population that really needs the People’s Settlement.
Mr. Wagner has provided detailed recommendations to increase management oversight and accountability. But I know that you will look at those recommendations as a successful businessman and know that these pretty basic items would have been the very basic requirements of a competent board capable of hiring and managing a competent Executive Director.
What is needed, is for the State to say No More. No More funding until such time as the Board is dissolved and replaced with individuals who have some basic management capabilities and who will care about the survival of People’s Settlement. No More funding until the newly seated Board hires a new, competent and committed Executive Director. This is going to be seen as very draconian and hard-hearted. But if the State is clearly cutting back on services and support for pretty much everything, you cannot send any scarce funds to this organization that we already know is not functional.
I don’t know if legally you can directly make changes to this Board and Director, but you can certainly with hold funds until they get their act together.
Respectfully,
Cassandra M, DelawareLiberal.net Editor
ps. The real meat of this thing comes in Appendix A of the AOA document. This contains the AOA comments as well as the PSA responses. It is completely mind-boggling. It is alot of info to read, but just take a look.
Tags: Delaware Way
This is very snarky, but you’d think that a Board that has a future Delaware Insurance Commissioner on it would know that HIPAA is the correct acronym, not HIPPA.
Tune in tomorrow at 9:00am WILM, 1450am, a huge discussion on this matter. Also, Adam Taylor is doing a story tomorrow.
Friends of PSA will be meeting on Friday morning to determine what our next steps will be. Court is a definate possibilty. If you care about this organization really, contact the Attorney Generals office and ask them why they are taking so long. Isn’t 3 years long enough with all the documentation they have been prior to the Auditors report, and the Auditors reports from the Prelim Report to this very thorough document enough?
This rogue Board as I have been saying for months havent a clue on what their fidicuiary responsibilties are. There wacky responses were obviously done porrly to stall for time.
Color me a conspiracy theorist on this, but the
big fish behind this mess, is yet to be named.
Nancy where are you? You have demonized for years over this mess…I am vindicated, you appear up to your ears in hypocrisy.
If you want to give the citizens of Wilmington a Christmas present…you and the entire board must resign or be forced from office. The longer you wait the harder it will be to piece this once great agency back together.
Now that all the problems at PSA are being exposed, I wonder how many other non-profits are in the same boat. How many have board members with no clue what the rules are when dealing with State or federal funds or how Bylaws of the group must be followed to be in compliance.
Does the money have real outcomes? I challenge all these faith based churches who are supposed to be providing services for ex felons. I am told they have no really skilled, certified counselors, but are using their friends and cronies. Many say they are requesting you join the church or attend church classes if you want to be in the program. This was another Bush idea..this faith based crap, instead of continuing having programs run and managed by organizations who employed appropriate certified counselors?
What we need, I think is a state version of Charity Navigator where every services organization has to account for revenues, overhead so you can evaluate how the money gets spent in some basic way. You couldn’t do exactly what Charity Navigator does without some additional overhead to do it, but you could get some basic data updated yearly so you can have a sense of the organizations efficiently trying to meet some goals vs trying to put money into their own pockets. And to make it all work, the State won’t give grants to any organization with less than 3 stars.
Cass,
I railed on the HIPAA thing on my show this afternoon. That one really bugged me. The fact that the AOA had to continually correct the error was side-splitting.
I thought it was more pathetic than side-splitting. I mean, whoever responded to the AOA clearly was looking to rationalize away their noncompliance and you could tell that they really thought they had knocked that one out of the park. But really, if you know anything about HIPAA, you certainly can contrive ways to collect certain types of data AND if they knew about HIPAA, they would have negotiated a compliance amendment with the agency to make sure that they could satisfy both the grant agency AND HIPAA. Weak.
And, I’ll go back to this again. You’d think that a board with a future Insurance Commissioner on it would have known something not just about HIPAA, but also would know something and policies and SOPs and adequate operational documentation. The failure here is absolutely structural and I’d bet fixing it is well beyond the skillset of the current board.
I just read the report once through, and I don’t get it, except that Tom Wagner is a Whiny Bitch, which I did not think of him until I read this report.
I don’t know enough about PSA to defend them, but I do know something about audits. And after reading the report, Wagner is not exactly covered in glory.
Did PSA actually take money for services it did not perform? I can’t tell from the audit, because Wagner’s claims weren’t really investigatory or truth-driven – they are all based on technicalities, mostly:
1. PSA didn’t hand over certain sign-in sheets by the deadline, and I won’t accept them late, nyah nyah.
2. PSA didn’t properly spoonfeed me the state budget for PSA services to prove the state cut funds for certain items, therefore I don’t accept your explanation that you didn’t do the service because the state cut funds for it.
3. Plus, there is a whole nother line of bullshit from Wagner where he says, “Yes, I see the state cut your funds for that service, but, well, you should have done it anyway.”
PSA was smart to respond point by point, because Wagner’s audit was a cut-and-paste job, amplifying a few issues by pasting in the same thing over and over again.
First of all, most of the items Wagner says he did not receive, are items he refused to receive because they were late – not delivered in the 2-month timeframe.
Secondly, for many of the items Wagner says PSA failed to deliver, Wagner himself acknowledges that the contract may only be amended by written consent of all parties. In response, PSA contends that the state cut the funding for that item from the budget. Fair enough – if the state unilaterally altered the contract and cut the funds for that service, then PSA would have a leg to stand on in not delivering the service. But Whiny Bitch never investigates the truth of PSA’s claim, only repeating over and over again that PSA did not show him the state’s budget with the item cut. Wagner, repeatedly:
It sounds like PSA sent Wagner a printout of an email with the budget attached, but the budget was not printed out with the email – and Whiny Bitch couldn’t figure it out.
And Nancy finally shows up!
How do I know? Clearly the writer knows little about audits. You do data collection for some defined period (because, you know, a report has to be published eventually) and that data collection involves some verification of that data. A thing that you can’t really do once the investigation is over.
The better question is why the PSA couldn’t comply with the data collection in 2 months? The PSA isn’t the world’s biggest organization and the Board clearly isn’t all that busy.
I am not Nancy and I really don’t know anything about PSA, and I do plenty of compliance audits of various kinds in the private sector. Almost all documentation for audits is assembled after the fact (not created, but organized and assembled). It takes time, and rarely is completed on deadline. Most auditors are amenable to extensions, and in many cases a formal process for granting extensions exists and are routine.
Assuming the docs PSA provided 4 weeks late were valid (which I don’t know that they were) Wagner was pissy not to accommodate them. This is a small social services organization for Chrissakes, not a pharmaceutical company.
If PSA turned over backdated or forged documents on 11/25, Wagner ought to tell us, but he does not; instead he just leaves that as an implication.
After what fact? The audit needs to have access to the referred documents in order to determine if the organization is in compliance with the contract or grant terms. You aren’t going to get much of an audit if you don’t get access to the paperwork that demonstrates your compliance with the terms or conditions.
The PSA is a relatively small organization, so you wouldn’t need months to find documentation of outcomes from a non-smoking course. He couldn’t tell you if the documents were forged unless he re-opened the investigation and decided to do the data verification that he should have been able to do in the original two month window.
Wagner did get access to the paperwork and he sent it back as if it didn’t count.
PSA gave plausible explanations for some of the charges, and Wagner blew it off without making reasonable efforts to validate the explanations.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending PSA, I don’t know them. The first thing that came to my attention was this report and I am relating my reaction to it. I was surprised at my negative impression of Wagner’s work.
If I didn’t know better I’d say some Republican developer wants that real estate. Hey wait a minute – I don’t know better.
He got access to the paperwork after he had asked for it and after he had closed the data collection. I’ve never been in an audit where the process waited for you. You come up with the data so that the auditors can complete their report on some deadline. Finding massive amounts of requested data only after you see the preliminary report is completely not kosher.
Wagner is doing just fine. It is you posing as an expert in auditing that is the problem. And if a developer gets that piece of property, the PSA Board can thank themselves for letting that happen.
The information anon is providing leads me to believe that he or she is definitely directly involved from the inside.
anon isn’t providing any information, just blowing smoke to try to make Wagner look like the incompetent here. Fortunately, anon doesn’t have the skills to pull that off.
And if a developer gets that piece of property, the PSA Board can thank themselves for letting that happen.
Baby out with the bathwater much?
The current board is a blip in the history of PSA.
Anon: The Auditor didnt trust the documents they sent in. They were given extra time after the preliminary report to object or prove him wrong. They obviously didnt have the documents or couldnt recreate them to his satisfaction. Like you said, you havent a clue what has gone on here! Wagners report could have been much stronger…and I personally wonder why that was.
It is the AG’s office tasked with looking into the missing money. The fact that Lake lied to Public Health stating, they had performed all the tasks, but didnt lie to Wagners auditor says volumes.
I am not sure any developer gets the property…thats premature. The board should be held responsible for all those idiotic decisions they made, some without a quorum…
Anon, what bullshit. When did the Auditor get documents and send them back ? The board had ample time to get their documents in, and were given a 2 week extension. At one point they were stating they “found the documents”, after receipt of the Preliminary Report. At least that is what Karen Weldin Stewart told WILM in a phone conversation. I’m guessing she took Willing’s word for that I doubt she actually checked it out personally.
Anon: What are you talking about? Are you a friend of Lakes or what?
Yvonne Brown the past President has all the evidence and asked all the appropriate questions, she was lied to again and again, while Willing and the other rogue members so stuck on Keith Lake and his lames excuses refused to look at the facts. Brown was presenting facts over a 2 year period…the rogues ignored.
There is a bigger fish here that is being protected!
Let me also point out that there is a lot of McDowell stuff here. Keith Lake is also a member of the outgoing SEU board (how can we miss them if they never leave?). I would love to know the inside scoop on the KWS, Keith Lake and Harris McDowell triangle.
Unfortunately, I only know small bits of it.
The current board is a blip in the history of PSA.
You definitely get elevated from being a blip when you are the Board who actively mismanaged this great institution into the ground.
And I am not advocating getting rid of this institution — I am advocating that the state withhold grants and funds until a new Board and Executive Director is in place. Since apparently no one on this Board is embarrassed by or ashamed enough of their mismanagement to resign.
I am actually agreeing with you about the board. I don’t see any reason to doubt your assertion that the whole board has to go. I don’t know those people and I have no special like or dislike for them.
That takes nothing away from my critique of Wagner’s audit. One of PSA’s primary rebuttals was that the state had cut funds for certain line items. Wagner did not get to the bottom of that assertion, but instead hid behind “They didn’t give me a copy of the budget” – which makes me think perhaps PSA’s claim is correct (at least on that count).
And I am not advocating getting rid of this institution
If you think that is not the subtext of this report – I think you are being deliberately obtuse. If the State sought to continue PSA with new management it could have proceeded differently, instead of torpedoing private funding as well.
I am advocating that the state withhold grants and funds until a new Board and Executive Director is in place.
… who will hopefully be smart enough to reject any state funds unless they are accompanied by funding for a documentation manager and.
No state agency WILL give them ANY funds, that has been the situation for some time. United Way will not either. Not under this leadership or this board…they obviously refuse to leave. Why?
Why am I not surprised that Karen Weldin Stewart is involved with this? I have never regretted a vote more than the one I cast for her. What a mistake!!!! Please tell Gene Reed to get ready for 2012 and tell him I’m sorry for voting for the wrong person.
No state agency WILL give them ANY funds, that has been the situation for some time. United Way will not either. Not under this leadership or this board…they obviously refuse to leave. Why?
I am just learning about this for the first time this week… From where I sit, it looks like some board members must have turned green with envy they were not chosen to run the place, and started using the press, United Way, and the auditor’s office as weapons to continue their catfight.
But I could be wrong.
Wagner did not get to the bottom of that assertion, but instead hid behind “They didn’t give me a copy of the budget” – which makes me think perhaps PSA’s claim is correct (at least on that count).
This is Clown Shoes.
You get to the bottom of the assertion by giving him the budget and the state mandated changes. The auditor reviews that and then verifies that with the state or issuing agency. Otherwise the auditor has nothing to go on.
If the State sought to continue PSA with new management it could have proceeded differently, instead of torpedoing private funding as well.
Now this is how I know you are defending the insiders here. The state certainly did not torpedo private funding, the appearance of PSA mismanagement did. Plus, the state is not yet calling for closing the building or for a management change out. They are investigating specific allegations of mismanagement, which is exactly their job.
Awww, damn – y0u just ruined the Clown Shoes award. Too bad, it used to be a nice feature.
If the auditor had nothing to go on, then that’s what he should have said. Is that what he said? you tell me.
The report keeps mentioning an email with a budget attached… It very clearly seems like someone attempted to deliver the budget by forwarding (or printing) an email, but neglected to attach the budget, and Wagner didn’t follow up. Is that what happened? I don’t know, but that’s the way the audit reads.
That budget contains the truth that would prove or disprove PSA’s assertion that the state cancelled funds for the disputed services. Wagner knows the budget exists, so to proceed to a conclusion as if it does NOT exist is dishonest.
this is how I know you are defending the insiders here
look down at your feet
Wagner knows the budget exists, so to proceed to a conclusion as if it does NOT exist is dishonest.
Not really. The audited entity is supposed to deliver on the data to be audited. If the audited entity doesn’t have it, or can’t figure out how to attach it to email in a whole two months then the auditor has nothing to assess. It really is that basic. In my own business, not having data that an auditor wants to see is a firing offense. And none of these auditors are going to go looking for something that you clearly don’t have.
The budget is not the mystery. The mystery is why an organization that actually depends upon that budget doesn’t have it. And if it is as simple as not being able to attach it to an email, I’d say that whoever answered the auditor was pretty spectacularly unqualified for the job.
Keep up your anonymous clown shoes dance, though. You’ll get there sooner or later.
Anon. It is obvious you are either one of the rogue board, or a friend of them. This has less to do with a budget as it does with not having documentation to back up where the money was spent in an array of programs.
Auditor:
“As can be seen by the auditors comments throughout Appendix A. PSA’s response does not address the issues found by Auditor during the course of the investigation. If anything, PSA’s response causes more concern regarding PSA’s response causes more concern regarding PSA’s ability to administer ANY State grants”.
“Weak controls, including lack of management, approval and review, contributed to the lack of supported transactions. The Ex. Directors lack of knowledge, and/or willing intent to withhold information resulted in discrepancies in the information presented”.
and on, and on!