A caseworker is supposed to lay eyes on children who were the subject of abuse and neglect reports. That’s the job. Knock on the door. Check on the kids. Write down what you saw. In Larimer County, Colorado, authorities say one caseworker didn’t check on those children. And then she filed paperwork saying she did. She was charged with 99 criminal counts. Ninety-nine. And here’s the part that should keep you up at night. In Colorado, counties aren’t even required to report that kind of falsification to the state. So how many more are out there that nobody ever caught?

This is the Father’s Advocacy Network podcast. I’m Adam Neuerburg. Today we’re talking about the paper. The case file. The report. The document a judge reads before deciding whether your children come home. Because across this country, caseworkers have been caught falsifying records, lying to courts and withholding evidence. And when they get caught, the consequences are often small, or nothing at all.

Let’s start in Georgia. An investigation by 11Alive’s series The Reveal uncovered that more than 800 employees of Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services were disciplined in under six years. That’s out of roughly 1,900 caseworkers. Do the math with me. More than 800 out of about 1,900. The report calls it nearly half the workforce. Of those disciplined workers, 42 percent were cited for negligence or inefficiency. That means things like failing to investigate reports, failing to follow up on safety checks, failing to make sure children in state custody were actually okay. And 14 percent falsified records or lied about checking on children. Let that sink in. These are the exact kinds of records judges rely on. Home visit reports. Safety checks. The notes that say, I was there, I saw this, the home was unsafe. And here’s the problem nobody in the system wants to talk about. When a caseworker submits a report saying they visited a home and saw unsafe conditions, the judge has no independent way to check whether that visit ever happened. None. The judge takes the paper at its word. So if you’re a parent listening right now, and the report in your case describes a visit you don’t remember, or a conversation that never happened, you are not crazy. In Georgia, it happened often enough to show up in the discipline numbers.

Now back to Colorado, because that 99-count case tells us something bigger than one worker. According to reporting by The Colorado Sun, Colorado’s rules are so weak that a caseworker caught falsifying records in one county can simply get hired in another county, with no one the wiser. There’s even a name for it. County hopping. Think about that. Get caught lying about kids in one county. Move one county over. Start fresh. Get a new caseload. Get a new set of families. And because counties don’t have to report falsification to the state Division of Child Welfare, nobody can tell you the true scale of the problem. Not the state. Not the legislature. Not you. Now ask yourself the question the system refuses to ask. While those false reports were saying everything was fine, how many children were actually in danger? Children the state had already taken responsibility for?

Then there’s Texas. In Harris County, according to reporting by WTHR and NBC DFW, a judge named Mike Schneider ordered CPS to pay $127,000 over a wrongful removal. He called the agency dishonest, and said its conduct was potentially malicious. Here’s what happened. A hospital MRI revealed injuries on an infant. CPS took two young children, a 2-year-old and a 5-month-old. But doctors later determined the baby had a blood clotting disorder that explained all of the findings. A medical explanation. Everything accounted for. So the parents brought their children home. And then a caseworker went and sought emergency custody, without telling the court about that medical explanation. Read that again. The evidence that cleared the family existed. The caseworker knew about it. And the judge wasn’t told. That’s not a mistake on a form. According to the report, that is deliberately withholding evidence that pointed to the parents’ innocence.

And it’s not one bad actor. An Austin American-Statesman review of state and court documents found at least 50 Texas CPS workers had been caught lying to prosecutors, ignoring court orders, falsifying state records or obstructing law enforcement investigations, since 2009. Many faced minimal or no consequences. Some kept working in child welfare after the documented misconduct. If you lied to a prosecutor, would you keep your job? Now Washington state. A KING 5 investigation revealed that after grave policy violations were documented in a foster child’s case, no one inside Washington’s child welfare system was disciplined. Not one person. Nobody was even investigated. And North Carolina. The state’s child welfare system is run county by county, across all 100 counties, with no unified statewide data system until 2025. The state health department announced it was taking over child welfare services in Vance County in May 2025, and in Davidson County in January 2026, noting that was the sixth such takeover. According to the report, the consequences show up in child death cases, where adopted children vanished for years and the system never noticed they were gone. WRAL’s investigative reporting described the system as broken.

So why does this keep happening? Because of how much power sits in one set of hands. Caseworkers can enter homes and interview children privately, often with no warrant and no attorney there for the family. They can remove children, sometimes within hours, before a judge ever looks at the case. Then they testify, and judges treat their files as authoritative. Caseworkers write the reports. Supervisors approve them. Courts read them. And when misconduct is alleged, the same system investigates itself. And on top of that, workers are often shielded from personal liability through qualified immunity. That makes it extraordinarily hard for a family to hold an individual worker accountable in court. Put it all together. The same people write the record, check the record and protect the record. That’s not oversight. That’s the fox guarding the henhouse.

And don’t let anyone tell you this gets fixed with a bigger budget. You can’t buy honesty with more funding. What’s missing is consequences. The report counts zero states with universal decertification of caseworkers for misconduct. Zero. Think about what that means. A caseworker who lies about your kids can, in some places, just move to the next county and keep doing the job. Meanwhile, according to the report’s figures, more than 650,000 children are labeled abused or neglected every year based on caseworker investigations, and more than 273,000 were placed into foster care in a single year. All riding on paperwork that, too often, nobody checks. A parent accused of a crime has the right to an attorney, the right to see the evidence and the right to a fair trial. A parent investigated by CPS often gets none of that. And the stakes can be worse than a criminal conviction. Your children.

So what can you do if you’re in this right now? This isn’t legal advice. FAN is not a law firm. But here’s what we’ve seen help families when the paperwork is stacked against them. One. Keep your own record of every contact. Every visit, every call, every text. The date, the time, how long they stayed, who was there and what was said. Write it the same day. If a report later claims a visit that didn’t happen, your log is your answer. Two. Get the full name of your caseworker and their supervisor, in writing. You need to know exactly who signed off on what. Three. Request your records. Ask for copies of the reports and case notes about your family, and put that request in writing. You can’t challenge what you’ve never seen. Four. If there’s a medical explanation, a test result, a doctor’s letter, anything that helps your case, get your own copy and make sure your attorney has it. Don’t assume the agency will hand it to the judge. In that Texas case, it didn’t. Five. Put your requests to your attorney in writing. If you want something challenged or something put in front of the court, say so in writing, and ask for the answer in writing. And six. Don’t fight this alone. Go to fathers advocacy network dot com slash case help.

Everything in today’s episode, with links to the reporting from Georgia, Colorado, Texas, Washington and North Carolina, is in our full research report at fathers advocacy network dot com, in our foster care research section. If this made your blood boil, share it. Send it to one person who still believes the case file is always the truth. And follow the show so you don’t miss what we expose next. I’m Adam Neuerburg. This is the Father’s Advocacy Network. Let the silenced speak.