Summary

The Legal Services Corporation (LSC), operating through grantees, provides legal assistance in civil matters to low-income persons. In the past year, LSC's Office of Inspector General and GAO have cited misreporting by grantees on both the number of cases they closed in 1997 and the number they had open at the end of that year. The accuracy of the data is important because LSC has used case statistics to seek higher funding and Congress has considered these statistics in setting funding for LSC. This report determines (1) what efforts 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. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Legal Services Corporation: More Needs to Be Done to Correct Case Service Reporting Problems, by Laurie E. Ekstrand, Director of Administration of Justice Issues, before the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, House Committee on the Judiciary. GAO/T-GGD-99-185, Sept. 29 (11 pages).

GAO noted that: (1) LSC revised its written guidance and issued a new handbook to its grantees to clarify case reporting requirements; (2) based on telephone interviews with a sample of 79 LSC grantee executive directors, GAO estimates that 90 percent of grantees viewed the new guidance as having clarified reporting requirements, overall; (3) virtually all grantees said they responded to the new requirements by making or planning to make one or more changes to their program operations; (4) however, many grantees indicated that they were unclear about certain aspects of LSC's reporting requirements, particularly regarding: (a) the specific information required on client assets; (b) the information required for documenting citizenship/alien eligibility for services provided over the telephone; (c) the criteria for avoiding duplicate counts of cases; and (d) who can provide legal assistance to clients in order for the service to be counted as a case; (5) LSC initiated a self-inspection procedure in which grantees were required to review their 1998 case data and submit certification letters to LSC if they found that the extent of error in their data was 5 percent or less; (6) grantees who could not certify their 1998 data were required to develop corrective actions that would address the problems identified; (7) about 75 percent of the grantees submitted letters to LSC certifying that the error rate in their 1998 data was 5 percent or less, while about 25 percent of the grantees submitted letters to LSC indicating that they could not certify their 1998 data; (8) according to LSC, about 30 of the 50 grantees with the largest caseloads were unable to certify their 1998 case data; (9) GAO could not assess whether the number of certified and uncertified programs that LSC obtained for 1998 was correct, lower, or higher than it should be; (10) this is because LSC did not provide grantees with a standardized way of reporting their self-inspection results, and LSC's instructions on how to conduct the self-inspections may have led some of the smaller grantees to select too few cases to reliably assess the amount of error in their case data; (11) some grantees did not correctly interpret LSC's case reporting requirements; and (12) for these reasons, GAO does not believe that LSC's efforts to date have been sufficient to fully resolve the case reporting problems that occurred in 1997.