Federal audit finds 99% of Arkansas child abuse investigations broke at least one legal requirement

LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas hotline operators screened out a report that an 11-year-old girl had been raped by a family member because they thought a child that age might not understand the word “rape,” according to a federal audit that found nearly every child abuse investigation it sampled in the state failed to meet at least one legal requirement.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General issued the report Sept. 29. It covers the Arkansas Department of Human Services Division of Children and Family Services, which investigates most maltreatment reports, and the Arkansas State Police Crimes Against Children Division, which runs the statewide child abuse hotline and handles the most serious cases.

Auditors pulled a random sample of 70 reports the hotline rejected without investigation between Oct. 1, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2024. Ten of them should not have been screened out, the report says. Based on that sample, the inspector general estimates roughly 3,956 of the 27,690 reports Arkansas screened out that year were handled improperly.

The results for reports the state did accept were worse. Of 140 sampled in-home investigations, split evenly between DCFS and the state police division, 138 did not comply with one or more requirements for screening, safety assessment or investigation. Auditors estimate that 99 percent of the 21,268 in-home reports accepted during the year, about 20,964 cases, had at least one deficiency.

“These issues reflect systemic weaknesses in DCFS and CACD’s intake and investigative processes and increase the risk of harm to children,” the report says.

Reports that never got investigated

Besides the rape disclosure, the audit describes a report that two children were being watched through security cameras while they undressed in their bedroom. Hotline staff screened it out because the hotline manual had no protocol for voyeurism, even though the guide DCFS investigators use lists voyeurism within the state’s definition of sexual abuse.

A mandated reporter said a 7-year-old had missed 16 days of school, was failing most subjects and that the family gave conflicting reasons for the absences. Staff decided it did not meet the threshold for educational neglect.

Two reports were rejected because the hotline said it could not find someone involved. In one, there was no documentation that anyone tried to find the alleged victim. In the other, staff said they could not locate the alleged offender, though state policy only requires the hotline to be able to find the child or the child’s family. Four more were rejected for lack of detail without anyone calling the reporter back, including a case in which a child disclosed being molested by a half-sibling.

DCFS agreed that nine of the 10 should have been accepted. It told auditors six of those children had other DCFS involvement in which their safety was assessed, one alleged victim is now an adult with no younger siblings at home, and in two cases the children’s safety had not been assessed. The tenth report was a duplicate of an open case that was mislabeled as “not child abuse or neglect,” so the new information never reached the investigator.

Police and prosecutors not told

Arkansas law requires investigators to notify local law enforcement and the prosecuting attorney when an allegation involves severe maltreatment, a category that includes sexual abuse, abuse with a deadly weapon, serious physical injury and acts that could cause death. The agencies must be told again when the investigation is closed with a true finding.

In the sample, 35 severe maltreatment investigations had no record that police or prosecutors were notified at the start. At the close of those investigations, 48 had no record that law enforcement was told of the outcome and 40 had no record that prosecutors were. Eighteen of the missing notices involved cases where investigators found the abuse was true.

DCFS said it could not explain why the notices were not documented. The state police division said some investigators gave police and prosecutors verbal notice by phone instead of the written notice the law requires.

Other required notices were also missing. In 132 of 140 cases there was no record the victim was told the outcome. In 60 cases the alleged offender was never given the formal notice of allegations against them, which also informs them of their right to appeal. DCFS told auditors it stopped sending outcome letters to parents on advice from its Office of Chief Counsel, and that it was unaware of a state law requiring it to notify a victim’s school after a true finding.

Interviews, deadlines and safety checks

Investigators are required to interview the child, both parents and the alleged offender. In 134 of 140 cases, the agencies could not show those interviews were done as required. Eighty-four files had no documentation that every required interview happened or that investigators made a diligent effort to conduct them. Eleven children were not interviewed within the 24- or 72-hour window state law sets for starting an investigation.

Both agencies are supposed to log interviews within two business days. In 118 cases, interviews were entered more than a week later, and in 70 cases they were not documented until the day the investigation closed. DCFS blamed caseloads and staffing.

Arkansas gives investigators 45 days to reach a finding, with a possible 15-day extension. Thirty-two investigations in the sample missed that deadline, by as little as one day and as much as more than 200 days.

In 16 cases DCFS could not show it completed a safety assessment at all. Auditors noted DCFS switched to a new assessment process outside its case management system in January 2023 but never updated its policy manual, so investigators may not have known where to document the work. In one case, DCFS investigated an allegation that a foster child was bruised by a biological parent even though state law assigns foster care cases to the state police division to avoid conflicts of interest.

Why Arkansas was picked

The audit is part of a national series checking whether states meet the conditions of federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act grants, which totaled $103.2 million nationwide in fiscal 2024. Earlier reports faulted Maine and West Virginia.

The inspector general said it chose Arkansas after a risk assessment that weighed the state’s victimization rate, child fatality rate and response times, and after news coverage of a Mountain Home case in which Ozarks First reported the child abuse hotline had received 29 calls about a family over 11 years before police intervened.

Fieldwork ran from December 2024 through July 2026.

State’s response

The inspector general made six recommendations: review the screened-out cases immediately, rewrite the hotline manual to cover every type of maltreatment and spell out when to call reporters back, tighten procedures for notifying police, prosecutors and schools, bring both agencies’ policies in line with state law and each other, add custodial and noncustodial parent as interview categories in the case management system, and retrain investigators on interviews, notices and deadlines.

In an Aug. 21 letter signed by DCFS Director Tiffany Wright and Maj. Jeffrey L. Drew, commander of the Crimes Against Children Division, the state agreed with three recommendations and partly agreed with the other three. It said it “takes the findings of this audit seriously” and does not dispute most of the specific compliance findings.

The state pushed back on the report’s language about risk to children, asking the inspector general to separate documented violations from statements that the failures “increase the risk of harm to children,” since the audit did not examine whether any child was actually hurt. It also argued that many gaps were documentation problems rather than work that was never done. The inspector general acknowledged it did not determine whether any child was harmed and said its findings mean it could not substantiate that requirements were met, not that the work definitively did not occur.

On the screened-out reports, the state said the cases are now two to nearly three years old and that reopening investigations based on the original calls would not be appropriate. A state police review concluded five of the 10 should have been accepted, four should have gotten a callback for more information and one was a mislabeled duplicate. The division said it has since retrained hotline supervisors on callbacks and database searches. The inspector general said that review satisfies the recommendation.

DCFS said it began sending outcome notices to alleged victims in unsubstantiated cases on June 4 and planned to add notices to parents and in true cases by mid-September. The state police division revised its file review guide June 17 to require supervisors to verify notifications and safety assessments. DCFS said it will hold off on a full rewrite of the hotline manual until after the 2027 legislative session, when a state workgroup expects to propose changes to the Child Maltreatment Act.

The state also disputed the suggestion that training alone was the problem, saying the audit shows a need for “consistent supervisory oversight, clear expectations, accountability, and system supports.”

The Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline is 1-800-482-5964 or 1-844-SAVE-A-CHILD. The full 40-page report, including the state’s response, is available from the inspector general’s office.