Arizona to review adoptions, guardianships after records not disclosed

State officials have discovered a flaw in a system the Department of Child Safety used that let judges make decisions on removing children from homes without having all the information they needed.

Now, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes will review more than 650 closed cases to see if any of the documents not disclosed would have changed the outcomes.

That raises the possibility some court decisions about terminating parental rights, guardianships or adoptions will be overturned.

“I think it would depend on the circumstances in the case,’’ said David Lujan, DCS’ new director.

But even if DCS did not directly provide the documents to the courts or the parties — such as the parents involved — they may have obtained them through other means, such as subpoenas to the private providers who prepared them for DCS in the first place, Lujan told Capitol Media Services on Monday.

The closed cases may only be part of the problem.

Kirsten Wright, an assistant attorney general, sent letters Monday to the presiding judges in all 15 counties asking that they suspend action on all pending cases involving the placement of children for the next two weeks while her office and DCS determine what records may be missing.

“Our preliminary assessment of the situation has determined that a minimum of 3,800 juvenile dependency cases statewide may be impacted,’’ wrote Wright, chief counsel of the Child and Family Division of the Attorney General’s Office.

These also include cases where an appeal is pending. She said her office will ask that those cases be immediately returned to the trial judge who made the initial decision for a second look.

“We are going to look at this on a case-by-case basis,’’ Wright told Capitol Media Services. “And then the courts will have to decide what happens with regards to those cases.’’

She said that will help determine which cases need to be reopened — and, potentially, which prior decisions about children’s fates will be reversed.

But Wright said that’s not a given. She said a court may determine that the failure to disclose the documents resulted in “harmless error,’’ meaning the result of the case would not have changed even if the reports had been available.

They blame previous administration

While Wright and Lujan are working on a fix, Mayes and Gov. Katie Hobbs, both Democrats, are laying the blame for the problem at the feet of Republican former Gov. Doug Ducey and Michael Faust, Ducey’s pick for DCS director.

“They implemented this system and allowed these non-disclosures to go on for two years,’’ Mayes told Capitol Media Services. “It’s not acceptable to have a computer system that isn’t properly disclosing documents to all the parties.’’

Hobbs agreed, saying: “I’m proud that Director Lujan is taking swift action to right the wrongs of the previous administration. The mistakes made are unacceptable.’’

The problem is with a system put in place in 2021 by DCS to track all documents.

Known as Guardian, it was billed as a replacement for CHILDS, the Children’s Information Library and Data Source. The department found various programs with CHILDS, first implemented in 1997, including limited reporting capabilities and poor data quality.

Mayes said Guardian had its own problems, however.

“It was a flawed system from the get-go,’’ she said, citing delays in payments to foster parents. Those issues resulted in the resignation of the chief information officer for DCS.

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But what Lujan discovered has much more serious implications.

Guardian was set up so that outside entities providing services for children and families could file their own reports directly into the system.

“For example, we contract with organizations that do supervised parenting time visits with families,’’ he said. “Then they write a report about how that supervised visit goes. They could then upload it into Guardian.’’

Lujan said the previous administration had concerns a report might not be put into the correct case file, such as when two families had the same last name.

So the system was programmed so that providers could still upload their reports, but only into the portal. Then it would have to be reviewed by a case manager or supervisor before it would be put into the family’s file.

But DCS workers weren’t always checking that portal to be sure those reports did, in fact, get into the file shared with the courts, Lujan said. That created a backlog of unfiled reports, he said. Those are the reports DCS and the Attorney General’s Office now need to review to see if their absence from the files affected the outcomes.

Lujan said the failure to put the documents into the files made available to judges, families and attorneys does not necessarily mean any decisions will be reversed.

His department and the Attorney General’s Office, “out of an abundance of caution,’’ are doing a case-by-case review, he said.

Issue fixed, but others remain

He said the system problem has now been fixed.

In essence, Lujan said, any time a document is filed by an outside provider, it now will go directly into the case file. But to prevent the kind of misfiling issue, the case manager will get an alert, he said.

“They’ll go in, and they’ll check them to make sure that those files belong in those cases,’’ Lujan said

While Guardian was designed to be a better alternative to CHILDS, he said there are issues that remain.

DCS contracted with IBM last year to work on the system originally built by Microsoft.

“There were some flaws in the original design that are now being corrected,’’ which made it hard for users to navigate, Lujan said.

“They’re now in this process of making a lot of fixes to Guardian,’’ he said. “We feel very good that we’ll have a good system within the next few months once those changes have been made.’’

The actions and comments by Hobbs, DCS and Mayes come less than a week after Hobbs and Lujan invited Ducey and Faust to a ceremony to open a new facility where children removed from their homes can immediately be taken. There, both Hobbs and Lujan praised their predecessors for their work with children.

Hobbs’ press aide Christian Slater said Monday there is nothing inconsistent about the current governor, less than a week later, blasting Ducey and his DCS pick for what he said are problems unrelated to the new arrival center.