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 Latino immigrants founded by a local school board member, according to the county’s inspector general.
The county approved 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.
Centro Familia was founded in 1998 by Nancy Navarro, who is now a county school board member, and Pilar Torres with a goal of responding “to a dire but invisible crisis” concerning Latino immigrant children’s early education, according to the organization’s Web site.
Navarro, who no longer works at Centro Familia, is running for a vacant County Council seat.
Navarro said she has severed all ties with the center in 2004, when she was appointed to the school board, and has not spoken with Torres since then.
She said she has 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.”
