Stardate 20020712.2320

(On Screen): Every organization will suffer a certain degree of malfunction, carry a certain number of non-performers. It's impossible for any human institution to work perfectly. It's sort of like upkeep on a house; what you do is look for the places where the paint is peeling off or boards are coming loose and you do small maintenance to fix the problems as they pop up. By the same token, managers have to be aware of how their employees are actually doing, and be willing to can those who are not doing what they should.

But sometimes the rot goes so deep, the incompetence becomes so thoroughly ingrained that the only solution is to shut down the group, fire everyone, and start over. I've actually seen that happen at a corporation. Tektronix ended up doing that about 1978 with its professional employment group; it was so useless that no-one even bothered dealing with it any more, and Tek took the very extremely measure of terminating everyone in the group right up to the manager in charge, finding someone else entirely and telling them to create a new group from scratch with all new hires.

It sounds to me as if that's what Florida should do with its Department of Children and Families. Civil Service be damned; when an agency is as rotten and incompetent as this one, it isn't worth trying to filter through it to see if anyone there is worth keeping. After it was discovered that one young girl had been missing for 14 months before anyone (besides her caretaker) noticed, they did a real inventory (as it were) of the children they were supposed to be keeping track of and found that nearly a thousand of them could not be found, even though in theory every one of those kids was supposed to be getting visited once a month.

So they claimed they would reform. They claimed they'd clean up their act. They claimed that they'd stop screwing up. And some of their people managed to give away fifty boxes of confidential records to be auctioned off, which ended up being purchased by a reporter.

So then they really promised they'd clean up their act. This time for sure.

And now it comes out that some of their case workers are still faking records and pretending to make visits that they aren't actually making. One of them filed a report saying she'd visited a little boy and he was fine; on that same day the boy was actually murdered. She said she'd visited him at his mother's home; he'd actually been staying with someone else for a week. It's not clear that if she'd been doing her job that it would actually have made any difference for the boy who is dead, but that's not the point.

What's important is that it has become clear that DCF is riddled with liars, cheats, and incompetents. The only reason they found out that this particular case worker had been faking records is that one of her charges died. If the kid had merely been subject to abuse, no-one would ever have found out.

This organization can't be saved. It's time to raze it and start over.