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Audit of the Office of the Child Advocate Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

An overview of the purpose and process of auditing the Office of the Child Advocate.
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Overview

In accordance with Section 12 of Chapter 11 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Office of the State Auditor has conducted a performance audit of certain activities of the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) for the period July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2018.

We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

Below is a list of our audit objectives, indicating each question we intended our audit to answer and the conclusion we reached regarding each objective.

Objective

Conclusion
  1. Does OCA record and review critical incident reports (CIRs) according to its policies and procedures?

Yes
  1. Does OCA record and respond to complaint line contacts according to its policies and procedures?

Yes

 

To achieve our audit objectives, we gained an understanding of the internal controls we determined to be relevant to our audit objectives and tested the controls’ operating effectiveness over CIRs and institutional reports (IRs). We also performed the following procedures.

CIRs and IRs

We tabulated and analyzed the CIRs and IRs that OCA received during the audit period to gain a better understanding of the volume and types of incidents reported to OCA. During the audit period, OCA received 277 CIRs and 562 IRs. In addition, we performed the following procedures:

  • We tested a nonstatistical judgmental sample of 40 out of 277 CIRs received by OCA during the audit period to determine whether OCA recorded them on its tracking spreadsheet and in its database.  
  • We chose a nonstatistical judgmental sample of 8 out of 562 IRs, which we tested to determine whether each IR was retrieved from i-FamilyNet, saved on the OCA shared drive, and recorded in OCA’s database.

Complaint Line Contacts

We judgmentally chose a nonstatistical sample of 40 out of 754 complaint line contacts from the audit period. We tested each contact to confirm that it was (1) entered in OCA’s database and (2) responded to in a timely manner.

We used a nonstatistical sampling approach for our testing and therefore cannot project our results to the entire population.

Data Reliability

To determine the accuracy and completeness of data used during the audit, we conducted interviews/walkthroughs with key OCA personnel to enhance our understanding of the data and extracted CIRs and 51A and 51B reports from OCA’s database. We performed a reconciliation of case lists we received from OCA to monthly case lists that OCA received from the Department of Children and Families to ensure that OCA retrieved all the IRs it was supposed to receive from i-FamilyNet for the audit period. We also conducted basic reasonableness checks on spreadsheets by checking for duplicate cases and hidden rows, columns, and worksheets. Based on the analysis conducted, we determined that the data obtained were sufficiently reliable for the purposes of the audit.

Date published: May 16, 2019

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