Foster care review boards make recommendations to juvenile courts about children in need of a permanent home.
Yet these boards did not receive critical information from Arizona’s child welfare agency in more than half of the cases scrutinized by state auditors.
The Arizona Department of Child Safety is responsible for providing case plans and other documents used by local foster care review boards.
But state auditors say DCS did not keep all of those records in a case management system, and court officials seeking documents on behalf of the boards made errors.
The result was the boards may not have been able to do complete reviews, plus boards and court officials lost trust in DCS.
The audit also found that some DCS caseworkers broke policy by no-call, no-showing at case reviews by the boards.
DCS agreed with all findings.
