L.A. County children’s services office moves to improve oversight

The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services is moving to double the number of internal affairs workers after acknowledging a significant backlog of cases in which social workers were alleged to have made mistakes.

The team of about half a dozen employees is being augmented by social workers pulled from the field and workers from the county auditor-controller’s office. It is assigned to investigate missteps among the department’s 2,300 children’s case workers and to recommend disciplinary action.

“No one likes to have someone looking over their shoulder, but at the same time no one wants a child to be harmed,” Family Services Director Trish Ploehn said.

Ploehn said the department’s tremendous caseload earlier this decade caused previous leaders to reassign most internal affairs employees to fieldwork, but she has sought to rebuild the bureau since assuming the department’s top job in 2006.

Even with the new workers, however, the department will still not have all the oversight that Ploehn said it needs. A memorandum addressed to county supervisors recently called for 19 additional internal affairs workers at a cost of $2.2 million.

The backlog came to light recently, when the department said 53 social workers had been placed on desk duty as a result of 10 possibly preventable deaths in 2008 among children who had been under the watch of the department.

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