Delivery of state human services cited

The Minnesota legislative auditor is on a roll. A week after Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles released a report showing how dysfunctional the state’s water management system is, he issued a new report last week that serious questions the delivery of human services in Minnesota.

Human services takes up a huge chunk of the state budget, with much of it involving entitlement funding to care for the poor, the disabled, the elderly or the vulnerable. It involves a myriad of complex rules, regulations, eligibility standards, and funding sources and reimbursement policies between federal, state and county governments.

And counties apparently haven’t done the best of jobs. The main problem, the report says, is that the state uses the 87 counties for front-line administration of human services programs, while it’s the state and federal governments that set major policies for income support, health care and social services for needy Minnesotans, and they pay for a large majority of the costs — but not all. All the programs should be offered and the quality the same consistently throughout the state, but that’s not the case. As one example, the report cites the wide variation among counties in child support dollars collected for each dollar of program spending, from $1.70 to $9.35.

The report notes the growing costs to counties as state and federal governments mandate more programs without funding them. Minnesota now ranks third-lowest in the nation for the share of child welfare funds it provides to counties, and that 40 percent of county property taxes on average now go to pay for human services.

While Beltrami County isn’t cited in the report, it can offer some examples. Recently, county staff uncovered a billing error in child care subsidies and pointed it out to the state, which in turn is mandating that the affected families pay back more than $27,000 in overpayments. The state is willing to penalize Beltrami County for discovering its error, but also said it won’t pursue other counties — they have to self-report their errors, like Beltrami did.

And the county is now working hand-in-hand with the Red Lake Band of Chippewa to hopefully correct a long oversight — that the provision and funding of human services belongs to the state and federal government rather than the county, since its property tax dollars must subsidize services on the tax-exempt reservation. It’s a sore spot that need not be, as Red Lake is entitled to a direct government-to-government relationship with Congress.

Legislative Auditor Nobles is recommending a legislative working group to streamline services program requirements and consider changes in human services funding policy, as well as allowing the state more authority to act when counties don’t meet performance benchmarks. The raft of suggestions includes a pilot project in which the state assumes responsibility for some county duties, having the state give more oversight and assistance to counties struggling to deliver the full range of services, and asking that county boards take more oversight of local human services agencies.

Minnesota’s human services delivery system is in need of a serious overhaul, and the report moves Minnesota to that end.