[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 99 (Wednesday, July 14, 1999)]
[House]
[Page H5465]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




GAO REPORTS CONCERNING OPERATION OF LEGAL SERVICES CORPORATION ARE VERY 
                               TROUBLING

  (Mr. MILLER of Florida asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. MILLER of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to comment on the 
recent GAO report on the Legal Services Corporation.
  It turned out that audits conducted by the Legal Services 
Corporation's Inspector General during 1998 revealed gross 
overstatement of cases in all five of the grantees examined and 200,000 
cases were invalidated from audits on those five grantees alone.
  A subsequent GAO study on five more grantees was requested by several 
Members of Congress to determine the scope of this problem, and the 
results showed even more reason for concern.
  Besides invalidating at least 75,000 more cases, the GAO discovered 
that two of the five grantees, Puerto Rico and Chicago, had destroyed 
their client case files. In fact, the destruction of these files in 
Puerto Rico interfered with the ability of the GAO to conduct their 
audit. In Illinois, the destruction of the case files is against legal 
requirements set by the Illinois Supreme Court.
  The Legal Services Corporation itself claims to require their 
grantees to maintain their case files for at least 5 years, and that 
requirement is apparently violated.
  These reports are indeed very troubling concerning the operation of 
the Legal Services Corporation.

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