Ever make a personal phone call from work? How about to the tune of half a million dollars?
A quarter of the money spent last year on cellphones by Los Angeles County's child welfare department on "unnecessary or inappropriate" charges, according to an audit. I guess you can't be concerned with the welfare of a child if you're not concerned with your own. Of the $2.2 million spent in 2009 on the department's 5,000 cellphones, $514,000 went to devices that were never used, personal calls to foreign countries and "other questionable ends".
Merry Christmas to Trish Ploehn, who was removed last week as director of the Department of Children and Family Services. Ploehn was given a draft copy of the audit this fall - ample time to get that resume ready for another position she can screw up. She wrote in September that she would soon be providing the county Board of Supervisors with a detailed plan to address problems raised by the auditors, yet nothing was submitted.
Among the audit's findings:
• Welfare officials did not have up-to-date logs and could not identify users for more than 250 active phones.
• More than 1,400 cellphones were not used by employees, yet were activated and incurred $330,000 in service charges. At the same time, the department refused to give cellphones to child abuse investigators.
• Auditors carefully reviewed 20 users who appeared to have excessive charges and found one employee had incurred more than $2,000 in personal international long-distance charges.
• The department had 532 broadband cards to access the Internet from portable computers yet 220 were unused and incurred $90,000 in service fees.
And this is not the first discovery of the department's wasteful spending and lack of oversight. In 2007, they paid $5.9 million for about 2,400 of the portable computers so that social workers investigating abuse or neglect allegations might better access data relevant to their probes...but without infrastructure put in place to make them functional outside of the office, they ended up as desktop computers or simply collecting dust.
You can read the full audit details here, and continue to abuse and neglect your children without reproach, since they're hopelessly mismanaged.
A quarter of the money spent last year on cellphones by Los Angeles County's child welfare department on "unnecessary or inappropriate" charges, according to an audit. I guess you can't be concerned with the welfare of a child if you're not concerned with your own. Of the $2.2 million spent in 2009 on the department's 5,000 cellphones, $514,000 went to devices that were never used, personal calls to foreign countries and "other questionable ends".
Merry Christmas to Trish Ploehn, who was removed last week as director of the Department of Children and Family Services. Ploehn was given a draft copy of the audit this fall - ample time to get that resume ready for another position she can screw up. She wrote in September that she would soon be providing the county Board of Supervisors with a detailed plan to address problems raised by the auditors, yet nothing was submitted.
Among the audit's findings:
• Welfare officials did not have up-to-date logs and could not identify users for more than 250 active phones.
• More than 1,400 cellphones were not used by employees, yet were activated and incurred $330,000 in service charges. At the same time, the department refused to give cellphones to child abuse investigators.
• Auditors carefully reviewed 20 users who appeared to have excessive charges and found one employee had incurred more than $2,000 in personal international long-distance charges.
• The department had 532 broadband cards to access the Internet from portable computers yet 220 were unused and incurred $90,000 in service fees.
And this is not the first discovery of the department's wasteful spending and lack of oversight. In 2007, they paid $5.9 million for about 2,400 of the portable computers so that social workers investigating abuse or neglect allegations might better access data relevant to their probes...but without infrastructure put in place to make them functional outside of the office, they ended up as desktop computers or simply collecting dust.
You can read the full audit details here, and continue to abuse and neglect your children without reproach, since they're hopelessly mismanaged.
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