Auditor General DePasquale speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
Credit: State Of PA
An interim audit of the hotline created to report child abuse across the state by Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale’s office has uncovered that 42,000 calls went unanswered last year.
The shocking find came Tuesday during a press conference held by DePasquale. The report was released to media shortly after and laid out problems with the ChildLine system operated by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services.
The system is used to report suspected child abuse and sexual assault information to state authorities. Locally, prosecutions have come from calls to ChildLine in recent years.
The hotline has been found to be understaffed and under-supervised, with just 7 out of 146,000 calls being monitored by a superior.
“While strengthening laws to combat child abuse was a critical achievement, not providing the funding to enforce those laws was a disturbing failure,” DePasquale said. “Our report shows the results of that failure — 42,000 unanswered calls in 2015.”
“The critical problems our audit team has found so far simply cannot wait even another few months until this audit is finished,” DePasquale said Tuesday.
The ChildLine goal is that 4 percent or less of the hotline calls go unanswered. The goal was met in 2014 but not in 2015, which saw call volume increases. During the past year, 22 percent of calls were not answered.
“Each one of these unanswered calls could potentially be a child abuse allegation going unreported, putting children at risk,” the interim audit states.
The increase in calls has been attributed to changes in the child abuse laws that were brought on by the Penn State and Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal.
In addition to unanswered calls, some ChildLine callers waited for more than 30 minutes before getting a caseworker.
DePasquale said the understaffed Department of Human Services has hired more caseworkers since the audit process began but is still not where it should be. He said the department “needs to act more quickly.”
“We are talking about the health and well-being of children, which means there is no acceptable excuse for not handling every single call in a timely, efficient manner,” he said.
The full audit of ChildLine will be completed by the end of the year.
