Child Unit Worker Says U.S. Failed to Pursue Leads

A former employee of Los Angeles County’s child support program said she provided a federal agency details about alleged wrongdoing in the program just days before the federal agency concluded there was no need for an investigation.

Insisting on anonymity, the former employee told The Times that she spoke by phone Nov. 19 for almost two hours with an investigator for the Health and Human Services Department about numerous topics including the alleged falsification of documents within the district attorney’s Bureau of Family Support Operation.

The falsification, she said, was designed to enable the child support program to pass a state review and continue receiving millions of dollars from the federal government in incentive payments. Those statements buttress allegations made to The Times by other current and former employees of the district attorney’s office.

But on Nov. 25, Vicki Shepard, the federal regional inspector general for investigations, announced that no investigation would be conducted. Based on a Times series and information provided by agencies assigned to monitor the child support program, Shepard said, she determined that the “concerns and allegations have little or no merit” and do not warrant investigation.

“I couldn’t believe it,” the former county employee said in an interview. “How could they determine there was no merit to the allegations without investigating them?”

The federal investigator, Vicky Roberts, declined comment about the former employee’s remarks. Shepard and a federal inspector in Washington, D.C., who both first heard allegations of mismanagement within the child support program, did not return calls for comment Wednesday. Shepard last week said she would not comment on the probe.

Victoria Pipkin, a spokeswoman for Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, said the office agrees with the federal agency’s conclusions that there was no wrongdoing. “I’m pretty sure the feds know what they’re doing,” she said.

But attorney Gloria Allred, who represents the former employee and first called for the federal investigation, questioned the thoroughness of the review.

Insisting that the former employee provided “detailed and specific information” including names to the federal agency, Allred said there was no indication that those individuals or the allegations were pursued.

Instead, Allred wrote Wednesday to Shepard in urging her to reopen an inquiry, “you seem to have contacted those who should be the targets of the investigation and apparently, relying solely upon their denials, you closed your investigation.”

Others have questioned the extent of the federal inquiry, which ended three weeks after it was launched.

“Obviously, there was no investigation,” said former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Robert Philibosian. “The inspector general’s office just took statements that were obviously excuses . . . accepted them at face value and did nothing to follow up.”

County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, a frequent Garcetti critic who is holding a public hearing on child support today, said he had been looking forward to information from federal investigators and did not understand why the probe ended so swiftly.

“I don’t know if it’s politics or based on logic,” said Antonovich, adding that he is hopeful that an upcoming report from the state auditor will address some of the issues. “But based on the mail we are receiving, this is still a tremendous problem” in the child support bureau.

Federal investigator Roberts said the agency’s policies prevent her from even confirming a conversation with the former employee.

But the employee’s recounting of the conversation raises questions. For example, she says she gave investigators the names of several current and former employees who would support her allegations but, to the best of her knowledge, none has been contacted.

And many of the statements she made to The Times support previously reported allegations of other employees--that mail and crucial federal welfare forms were thrown away, that statistics were manipulated and that documents were falsified to boost federal incentive payments.

Specifically, she said, a supervisor was directed in 1995 to alter performance reports to the state to ensure that the county would pass its review and continue receiving funds.

In a letter to Allred, Shepard said that many of the issues raised in The Times’ series were beyond her office’s purview. But she homed in on the alleged falsification of documents as one issue that her office could investigate. However, Shepard’s letter says that Garcetti’s office had already conducted an internal investigation into an earlier falsification claim and found it groundless, as did the state.

The man who made that previous allegation, John Erlinger, is a former high-ranking Los Angeles child support analyst. He has been out of the country since the federal investigation began and could not be reached for comment.

The state official in charge of the review of Erlinger’s complaint, Vivienne DuFour, said she suspected it was true but that she was stymied by her boss from conducting a full investigation rather than a standard bureaucratic review.

DuFour said she was not contacted by the inspector general’s office.

“I was responsible for that review,” said DuFour, who now works for another state agency. “If they really wanted to investigate the facts, you would think they would have called me.”