COFAR blog

New data provided by the Massachusetts Disabled Persons Protection Commission (DPPC) and the Department of Developmental Services (DDS) raise further questions about the ability of DDS, in particular, to adequately investigate cases of abuse and neglect within its system.

As such, we think the data provide yet a further reason to place all investigative resources and functions within one independent agency — the DPPC.

The latest data, received under Public Records Law requests to both agencies, show that not only does the DPPC have fewer abuse investigators than does DDS, but the DPPC investigators themselves appear to have lower caseloads than do their counterparts at DDS.

Yet, the DPPC is the state’s sole independent agency charged with investigating abuse and neglect of disabled adults. As we have reported, the DPPC is so poorly funded that it has to refer most of the complaints it receives to DDS and other service-providing agencies to investigate.

The caseload data comes on top of previous data we received showing that the DPPC investigators tend to find that a higher percentage of abuse allegations have merit than do their counterparts at DDS. Given the DDS caseloads are higher than the DPPC’s, it appears possible that DDS investigators aren’t able to do investigations as thoroughly DPPC investigators.

The latest data obtained from DDS and the DPPC also show that the number of substantiations of abuse allegations in general has been dropping in investigations done, particularly by DDS.

DDS’s main function is to manage and oversee care to the intellectually and developmentally disabled through a network of both state-operated and corporate provider-operated group homes and other facilities. Because of that, DDS appears to face a conflict of interest in investigating allegations of abuse and neglect in its own system.

Higher DDS caseloads

The chart we created below shows the consistently higher average caseloads that DDS investigators have had compared with the DPPC’s investigators, although the DPPC’s caseloads have been rising in recent years.

Between Fiscal 2010 and 2018, DDS’s yearly caseload has averaged 51.9 abuse investigations per investigator, while the DPPC’s average caseload has been 27.9.  (DDS has employed an average of 31.4 abuse investigators each year while the DPPC has employed an average of 4.6 investigators each year in that time frame.)

Source: DPPC and DDS data

Based on the DPPC’s data, our second chart below depicts the dropping abuse substantiation rate each year for both the DPPC and DDS.

According to the data, the annual percentage of abuse allegations that have been substantiated by DDS and the DPPC dropped from a high of 28% in Fiscal 2006 to about 13% in Fiscal 2018. The conclusion we draw from this particular data is that funding to both agencies for investigations has been increasingly inadequate.

The DPPC’s higher abuse substantiation rate since Fiscal 2012

The data going back to Fiscal 2004 show that the DPPC began consistently substantiating a higher percentage of abuse allegations than DDS starting in Fiscal 2012. There were three years between Fiscal 2004 and 2011 in which DDS substantiated a higher percentage of allegations than did the DPPC.

There don’t seem to be clear reasons for either the relatively higher abuse substantiation rate by the DPPC or the dropping substantiation rate by DDS, in particular, although, as noted, one reason might be DDS’s relatively high caseloads.

The DPPC’s policy to reserve more serious cases for itself

It’s possible that the DPPC has had a higher abuse substantiation rate because the agency has tended to reserve what might be considered the most serious abuse cases to itself, and that those more serious cases would be more likely to be substantiated than would the less serious cases assigned to DDS.

At first glance, a policy document we received from the DPPC on assigning cases would seem to support that theory.  The policy lists a number of instances in which the DPPC assigns more serious cases to itself provided that it has the resources to do so.

But the DPPC policy is dated 1998. There doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern of abuse substantiations from either the DPPC or DDS that lines up with the policy or its revisions in 2013 and 2016.

DDS says DPPC substantiation data misleading

In a response earlier this month to our questions, DDS maintained that the data we used from the DPPC doesn’t reflect the true abuse substantiation rates for DDS.

The DDS response included a lengthy explanation for why this is so, but the gist of the explanation seems to be that the DPPC data doesn’t account for all of the cases that DDS investigates, and that the DPPC counts the cases differently than DDS. We don’t think, however, that any such differences would affect the overall results of our analysis because we used the DPPC’s substantiation-rate data for both the DPPC and DDS, and we are assuming that the DPPC has been consistent in how it accounts for the cases investigated by both agencies.

The DDS’s conflict of interest

As we’ve stated, the data point toward the logic of having all abuse investigations done by one independent agency. The current system under which abuse investigations are done by separate agencies makes no sense, and leads at the very least to the perception that the investigations done by DDS are not thorough and cannot be relied upon.

As we reported in our January 2004 issue of The COFAR Voice, the DPPC itself issued a position statement at that time charging that DDS (then the Department of Mental Retardation) and other state agencies were “vulnerable to pressures that could compromise the integrity of their investigative findings (in abuse cases).”

Filing legislation to place in investigative resources solely within the DPPC

We will share our findings regarding the DPPC and DDS investigation data with the Legislature’s Children, Families, and Persons with Disabilities Committee. We hope these findings will concern them as much as they concern us.

We are also seeking to file legislation in the current legislative session to place all resources for abuse and neglect investigations within the DPPC, and to place all DDS provider licensure and monitoring resources within an independent state Office of Quality Assurance.

The Children and Families Committee initiated a review of the DDS system in January of 2018 and called in the DDS commissioner and DPPC executive director on two occasions last year to testify about abuse and neglect in the DDS system. Both officials insisted the system is functioning smoothly and offered no suggestions for changing it.

The families in our organization know that the system isn’t fine and it isn’t running smoothly.  The Children and Families Committee, however, has not allowed those family members and guardians to testify publicly about their experience with the system.

We hope things finally begin to change in the new legislative session, which just started this month, and that the Legislature will begin to take concrete steps to protect the developmentally disabled in this state from abuse and neglect.

A clear starting point would be to give the DPPC, the state’s independent abuse investigation agency for the disabled, the necessary tools and authority to do the job.