Iowa’s Compliance With Requirements for Reporting Child Abuse and Neglect Could Be Improved

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 examining States’ compliance with the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act’s requirements for the intake and assessment of reports of child abuse and neglect. Based on our risk analysis, we selected Iowa for one of our audits.

What OIG Found

Iowa complied with the intake requirements for all 30 rejected family reports in our random sample. However, we found that 35 of 100 sampled accepted family reports for our audit period were not in compliance with 1 or more requirements related to the assessment of child abuse or neglect.

What OIG Recommends

We made one recommendation to Iowa to provide refresher training or periodic guidance to child protection workers to address our findings. The full recommendation is in the report. Iowa concurred with our findings and recommendation and outlined the actions it has taken or plans to take to address our recommendation.

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