The U.S. Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General reported Wednesday that many states are neglecting to track instances of abuse, sexual assault, and improper restraint of children in foster care facilities, exposing them to potential mistreatment, The Associated Press reports. The findings come two weeks after a Senate committee investigation found that children are subjected to abuse in foster care facilities around the country that are operated by a handful of large, for-profit companies and financed by taxpayers. States that are responsible for the nearly 50,000 children in these facilities are not doing enough to piece together which facilities or companies are problematic, said the new federal report. More than a dozen states don’t track when multiple abuses happen at a single facility or across facilities owned by the same company, the report found. “We found that many states did not have the information they would need to identify patterns of maltreatment in residential facilities,” the report said.
States are also not consistently sharing information about abuse, even when it occurs at facilities owned by companies that operate across the country. Federal taxpayers spend billions of dollars on foster care for thousands of children. Some children are placed with families in homes or with their relatives. The most expensive care, which can cost hundreds of dollars a day or more, involves a residential treatment facility — essentially a group home for children. Those children sometimes have complex medical or behavioral needs. 32 states told the HHS Inspector General that they do not track the abuses that happen in facilities that are run in other states by companies they have contracts with. The Inspector General recommended that HHS should help states track abuses at facilities, as well as ownership information, and create a location for states to share information about the problems occurring. HHS said it agreed with the recommendation, but it would not require states to gather such information.