Philadelphia City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart

The Philadelphia City Controller's office is poised to look into the city Department of Human Services' practices for removing children from parents, in response to Legal Intelligencer coverage on abuse and oversight issues in foster care and individual citizen tips about the agency.

Though not final, City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart said in an interview with The Legal on Monday that a performance audit of DHS is on the “short list” of agencies the watchdog office may pursue in its 2019 audit schedule. Chief among her concerns is how DHS removes children from their parents' homes for poverty-based reasons.

“DHS is a big area of the city's budget and is charged with caring for the children in our city,” Rhynhart said. “The reporting that's been done on the issues about kids who have been taken from their parents unfairly and also some of the abuse children have suffered could be cause for concern and it's something my office is looking into.”

DHS spokesperson Heather Keafer said in an email Monday that the department welcomes any inquiry.

“While we have not yet been made aware of a potential audit by the City Controller's Office, we welcome the opportunity to provide information about our services,” Keafer said.

An example of a poverty-based removal is if a given household lacks enough beds for all the children or if the dwelling itself is in disrepair. Removal is left to the discretion of the social worker, who has a wide latitude in determining whether a child lives in a dangerous setting.

Several family attorneys previously interviewed by The Legal questioned the wisdom of allowing such a wide latitude, arguing it often leads to unnecessary separations.

“There's situations where the agency will take a family of four kids and split them up. It would make more sense to subsidize an apartment for [the] mom because it would cost less than to pay four foster parents,” Philadelphia family lawyer John Capaldi said.

Philadelphia has the second highest rate of removal in the nation and the highest of any major U.S. city, according to Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, which also noted that as of 2016, there were 6,100 children in DHS custody.

The issue of child removal has also been the focus of legislation put forth by Philadelphia City Councilman David Oh, who called for stricter standards for separating children from families.

Oh argued that social workers are free to recommend that children be removed from their homes based merely on “gut” instincts and called for hearings to examine whether DHS should implement “objective guidelines and uniform reporting standards” for social workers to rely on when they suspect a child is being abused.

In October, Cynthia Figueroa, DHS's commissioner, said Oh's legislative push was misguided because state law sets the rules for social workers and cannot be changed by City Council.

She added, “State law, which was significantly amended in 2015 by the state legislature in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, provides adequate objective guidelines and uniform reporting standards; encourages reporting of child abuse made in good faith; contains penalties for false reports of child abuse; and requires a state approved training for mandated reporters.”