Montgomery County’s Department of Health and Human Services can’t account for more than $900,000 it paid to a child care center for Hispanic immigrants founded by a local school board member, according to the county’s inspector general.
The county approved about 70 invoices to Centro Familia in fiscal years 2007 and 2008 without verifying the “validity and appropriateness” of the payments, Inspector General Thomas Dagley wrote in a memo to the County Council on Wednesday.
Also, Centro Familia was unable to provide accounting records to justify the county’s payments, raising “significant concerns about … possible fraud, waste or abuse,” Dagley’s office wrote.
The center’s executive director, Pilar Torres, disputed the inspector general’s reports.
“We produced all the documentation he required,” she said, adding that there was “absolutely” no wrongdoing at the center.
“Anybody can come and visit us and see what we are doing,” Torres said. “There is no fraud.”
Torres said she saw the inspector general’s report as an “indictment” of the county’s fiscal management.
Centro Familia was founded in 1998 by Torres and Nancy Navarro, who is now a county school board member, with a goal of responding “to a dire but invisible crisis” concerning Hispanic immigrant children’s early education, according to the organization’s Web site.
Navarro, who is running for a vacant County Council seat, said she severed all ties with the center in 2004, when she was appointed to the school board, and has not spoken with Torres since then.
Navarro said she had not seen the inspector general’s report and declined to comment about it, but added that “as a public official I always want to make sure the tax payers dollars are used properly.”
The head of the DHHS, Uma Ahluwalia, said her department closely monitored the services offered by Centro Familia and added she believed that “the intent of the program was being carried out.”
She said her department, which has an annual budget of more than $270 million, also intends to “follow up” with Centro Familia to account for where the money was spent.
The controversy wasn’t the first involving DHHS. Last year the inspector general found that the department had paid a contractor $137,700 for projects that officials couldn’t prove were completed.
According to published accounts, Ahulwalia resigned as director of a child welfare agency in Washington state in 2005 after overspending $12 million. Ahulwalia said there were “many issues” at play in her resignation.
