Lake County Gazette

An audit of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services garnered heat from politicians seeking changes.

“The recent audit is chock-full of DCFS’s inability under Marc Smith’s leadership to keep track of key information, to provide mandated medical children in the state’s custody, and, most alarmingly, to ensure the safety of a home before a child is returned after having been removed because of abuse and neglect allegations,” Tom Weber said. “When you have a 98% failure rate, something is horribly wrong with the system, starting at the top.”

The auditor general began conducting the DCFS 2020 because of Public Act 101-0237.

KPVI reported the Illinois Auditor Genera’s review of the DCFS found many failures, such as failing to provide safety checks before returning to their families.

“I remember looking at the 14 different visits with DCFS prior to that and a lot of questions started to arise,” Weber said. “In the last three years, it’s just been more questions piling up one on top of the other.”

The Telegraph reported a law was named in honor of two-year-old Ta’Naja Barnes after her death in 2019 that required DCFS to complete home safety checks, but the audit found that even though this is now needed, it’s not happening.

“Folks, when we sit here and we listen to one year and 122 children die, that is one child every three days,” Weber said. “As a grandfather, I look at my four grandkids with a fifth on the way, and I see how small they are and how fragile they are.”

The audit was released on May 12 from The Office Of The Auditor.

“It is transparent from the audit that DCFS is more broken, not less since Smith and (Governor) J.B. Pritzker have taken over,” Weber said. “We have waited to see clear signs of improvement and have seen nothing. We have given Pritzker and Smith chances to right the ship in a direction that we could all get behind and support.”