Legal Services Corporation: More Needs to Be Done to Correct Case Service Reporting Problems
GGD-99-183
Published: Sep 20, 1999. Publicly Released: Sep 27, 1999.
Skip to Highlights
Highlights
Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO determined: (1) what efforts the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) and its grantees have made to correct problems with case service reporting; and (2) whether these efforts are likely to resolve the case reporting problems that occurred in 1997.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Legal Services Corporation | The President of LSC should clarify and disseminate information on the specific information on client assets that grantees must obtain, record, and maintain. |
Closed – Implemented
LSC developed specific and simplified guidance on asset documentation. LSC incorporated these changes into its Case Service Reporting Handbook and disseminated it to all of its grantees.
|
| Legal Services Corporation | The President of LSC should clarify and disseminate LSC's criteria for single recording of cases. |
Closed – Not Implemented
According to LSC, it has devoted a significant amount of time attempting to improve guidance on this matter. LSC has concluded that in most cases, issues of duplication are fairly clear (for example, a client is entered into the computer system more than once, or the same client has visited two or more grantee offices with the same legal problem). LSC says that in other cases legal judgment is involved in deciding whether to count legal assistance to a client as more than one case. LSC believes that issuing new guidance would not resolve the issue and that the overall error rate in its grantees' caseload statistics have declined in the past year even without a change in guidance on this particular aspect of reporting. Accordingly, LSC has decided to leave the guidance on single case reporting as it is.
|
| Legal Services Corporation | The President of LSC should clarify and disseminate LSC's policy concerning who can provide legal assistance to clients for the service to be counted as a case. |
Closed – Implemented
In its revised case reporting handbook, LSC specified who can render legal assistance and under what circumstances.
|
| Legal Services Corporation | The President of LSC should explore options for facilities correct and consistent understanding of reporting requirements, such as developing and disseminating a training video for grantee staff. |
Closed – Not Implemented
LSC believes that actions it already had in place before GAO's review--such as updating information on its web site and providing responses to questions over the telephone, in writing, and during personal visits to grantee offices--are effective in facilitating understanding of case reporting requirements. Therefore, it does not plan to take action on this recommendation.
|
| Legal Services Corporation | The President of LSC should develop a standard protocol for future self-inspections to ensure that grantees systematically and consistently report their results for open and closed cases. |
Closed – Implemented
LSC utilized a standardized data collection instrument for its most recent self-inspection that was accompanied by clear and detailed instructions for sampling, response, and tallying the results.
|
| Legal Services Corporation | The President of LSC should direct grantees to select samples for future self-inspections that are sufficient to draw reliable conclusions about magnitude of case data errors. |
Closed – Implemented
In LSC's most recent self-inspection, grantees were instructed to draw samples that were sufficiently large to ensure that results from them were reliable.
|
| Legal Services Corporation | The President of LSC should ensure that procedures are in place to validate the results of LSC's 1998 self-inspection, as well as future self inspections. |
Closed – Implemented
At the direction of Congress, LSC's Office of Inspector General validated LSC's 1999 self-inspection results. No validation was done for 1998, and it is unclear what/if any future validation efforts will be undertaken.
|
| Legal Services Corporation | The President of LSC should clarify and disseminate information on the types of citizenship/alien eligibility information grantees must obtain, record, and maintain for clients who receive legal assistance only over the telephone. |
Closed – Implemented
LSC issued a revised case reporting handbook to its grantees, which contained a section explaining the information required in telephone service only cases.
|
Full Report
Office of Public Affairs
Topics
Eligibility criteriaFederal grantsGrant administrationInternal controlsLegal aidReporting requirementsImmigration statusStatistical dataData errorsLegal services