Overview
Each fiscal year, the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) receives and compiles data for more than 220,000 cases, generating more than 1.9 million transactions submitted by more than 3,000 private attorneys who are assigned cases through Notices of Assignment of Counsel (NACs). Section 12 of Chapter 211D of the Massachusetts General Laws established an Audit and Oversight (A&O) Department within CPCS to monitor the submitted bills. Currently, CPCS has a staff of four attorneys performing audits on submitted bills associated with NACs. The audit process is initiated by CPCS’s computer system, which selects every 650th submitted bill for review. A&O reviews the selected bills and supporting documentation and, if necessary, makes modifications to the amounts billed by the attorneys.
Although this CPCS audit process is an important control to ensure that submitted bills are accurate and proper, the Office of the State Auditor (OSA) believes that rather than selecting bills for review based on random selection, CPCS should consider developing a more effective, targeted risk-based approach such as analyzing its billing data to identify outliers among the billings in the group.
For example, we analyzed attorneys’ bills using CPCS data and identified all the outliers, i.e., NACs whose hours billed exceeded a statistically determined expected number of hours per NAC for each billing type, as illustrated in the table below. We calculated the expected number of hours per NAC using a statistically valid method.
Outliers and Amounts Billed
|
Case Type |
Fiscal Year |
Total Number of NACs |
Norm for All NAC Hours Billed |
Number of NACs Above the Norm |
Approximate Dollar Amount of Outliers Billed |
|
District Court |
2015 |
148,061 |
22.9 |
9,223 |
$ 17,008,890 |
|
District Court |
2016 |
146,631 |
23.2 |
9,207 |
17,629,990 |
|
Superior Court |
2015 |
9,606 |
76.0 |
596 |
4,775,012 |
|
Superior Court |
2016 |
9,940 |
75.8 |
551 |
4,676,688 |
|
Juvenile Court |
2015 |
10,001 |
24.1 |
641 |
1,306,255 |
|
Juvenile Court |
2016 |
10,432 |
25.1 |
660 |
1,449,070 |
|
Total |
334,671 |
20,878 |
$ 46,845,905 |
Although this information is not shown in the table above, for district, superior, and juvenile courts combined, the percentage of NACs determined to be outliers was 6.24% for both fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2016. In fiscal year 2015, the percentage of outliers with at least three times the norm of billable hours was 5.17%. In fiscal year 2016, the percentage was 5.90%.
OSA believes that by using a risk-based approach like this, CPCS will be able to identify NACs that pose a higher risk and focus its limited resources on reviewing those.
Fiscal Year 2015 Outlier and Non-Outlier Cases and Amounts Paid
|
Court Type |
Percentage of |
Percentage of Total Paid That Was for Non-Outlier NACs |
Percentage of Outlier NACs |
Percentage of Total Paid That Was for Outlier NACs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
District |
93.77% |
72.23% |
6.23% |
27.77% |
|
Superior |
93.80% |
62.40% |
6.20% |
37.60% |
|
Juvenile |
93.59% |
69.11% |
6.41% |
30.89% |
Fiscal Year 2016 Outlier and Non-Outlier Cases and Amounts Paid
|
Court Type |
Percentage of |
Percentage of Total Paid That Was for Non-Outlier NACs |
Percentage of Outlier NACs |
Percentage of Total Paid That Was for Outlier NACs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
District |
93.72% |
71.51% |
6.28% |
28.49% |
|
Superior |
94.46% |
63.51% |
5.54% |
36.49% |
|
Juvenile |
93.67% |
68.24% |
6.33% |
31.76% |
As noted in the tables above, a relatively small percentage of the total billings was associated with more than a quarter of the money paid in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.
| Date published: | February 28, 2018 |
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