West Virginia Did Not Comply With Intake, Screening, Assessment, and Investigation Requirements for Responding to Reports of Child Abuse and Neglect

Why OIG Did This Audit

• Abuse and neglect against a child by a parent, caregiver, or another person can have a long-term impact on the child’s health, opportunity, and well-being. Abuse can be physical, sexual, or emotional in nature. Neglect is a failure to meet the child’s basic needs, such as housing, food, clothing, education, and access to medical care.
• This audit is part of a series that examines States’ compliance with the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act’s requirements for the intake, screening, assessment, and investigation of reports of child abuse and neglect. Based on our risk assessment and West Virginia news outlets that reported the high-profile death related to child neglect of a teenager, we selected West Virginia for audit.

What OIG Found

On the basis of our sample results, we estimated that 91 percent of the 100 screened-in family reports for our audit period were not in compliance with 1 or more requirements related to the intake, screening, assessment, and investigation of child abuse and neglect.

What OIG Recommends

We made four recommendations, including that West Virginia take the appropriate steps to ensure that child welfare workers perform all required procedures, provide training, develop a system edit, and develop written policies and procedures. The full recommendations are in the report. West Virginia concurred with all four recommendations, and outlined actions that it has taken and plans to take to address our recommendations.