A result that can keep a family torn apart
In a child-welfare case, few pieces of paper carry as much weight as a drug test.
A positive result can stop visits, delay reunification or show up as evidence in court. A negative result can be the first good news a parent has had in weeks. The parent rarely sees the lab, the sample or the person who handled it. They see a result, and they live with what it means.
So I wanted to know a simple thing: who does DSS pay to test parents, and how much? The answer turned out to be harder to find than it should be.
The contract everyone is supposed to use
South Carolina has a mandatory statewide contract for drug and alcohol testing. The current agreement is with Premier Biotech LLC (contract 4400038224), running from November 1, 2025, through October 31, 2030. The listing says, in capital letters: “THIS IS A MANDATORY STATEWIDE CONTRACT.”
Before that, the statewide contract was held by another vendor from 2017 to 2022, and by Premier Biotech Inc. from 2022 to 2025.
There’s an important nuance. “Mandatory” applies to covered government purchases. It doesn’t mean every test in the state must go through one company. DSS has its own authority for some direct client services. So the existence of the contract alone doesn’t prove anything was bought the wrong way.
The failure DSS reported on itself
Here’s what caught my attention.
The state publishes a list of unauthorized purchases that agencies report. In it, DSS recorded a February 27, 2017 purchase of $17,828 under the heading “Failure to Use Mandatory Statewide Drug, Alcohol, Background Screenings Contract.” DSS submitted that entry in April 2021, four years after the purchase.
That same year, 2017, DSS made a major change. It stopped funding drug testing through the county alcohol and drug authorities and decided to use a single provider for the whole state, according to a letter the state’s alcohol and drug agency sent to legislators.
The money that followed
After that change, something shows up in the spending files.
Inside DSS’s internal payee “DSS Case Services,” there’s an account for laboratory services. It was near zero before FY2018. It jumped to about $889,000 in FY2018, then ran $2 million to $3 million a year. Through FY2025, it totals about $17.7 million.
The public file doesn’t name a single laboratory.
“DSS Case Services” isn’t a company. It’s an internal label for payments made through DSS’s case systems. The file shows the account type and the amount, but not who was paid.
So here’s where the records leave us:
-A mandatory statewide testing contract existed.
-DSS reported at least one failure to use it.
-About $17.7 million in lab charges followed, recorded in a way the public can’t trace to any vendor.
I can’t tell you from these records which companies were paid. Neither can any other member of the public. That’s the problem.
One mother’s results
Behind those hard-to-follow payments is a parent’s drug-test result. The question isn’t only which laboratories got the money. It’s what safeguards DSS bought in return. In my advocacy work, I’ve helped a mother I’ll call A. understand the drug-test evidence used in her case. Here is what the records and sworn testimony show.
Four companies, one result
A.’s results arrived on Premier Biotech letterhead. But Quest Diagnostics ran her urine test, and United Drug Testing Laboratory, or UDTL, in Boise, Idaho, ran her hair test. The results were signed by a medical review officer from yet another company, i3screen, which she testified is “entirely separate” from Premier.
Subcontracting can be allowed, but the state contract sets a floor: any lab “must be currently certified by SAMHSA for all DOT and SAMHSA or CAP for non-DOT” testing. A.’s tests were non-DOT, so CAP accreditation applied. UDTL’s website lists only a basic federal CLIA certificate and an Idaho clinical lab license. It doesn’t list CAP accreditation or SAMHSA certification.
The review that was switched off
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A medical review officer is a doctor whose job is to reach the person tested about a positive result and ask about prescriptions before the result is final. That call is the only place a prescription can come up. The federal form tells people not to write medications on the copies sent to the lab or the doctor, and says the doctor “may contact you to ask about prescriptions.” The state contract requires three attempts within 24 hours, then three more by the agency’s designated employer representative. If no one reaches the person, “the MRO must hold the result for a period of 10 days.” i3screen’s own service terms promise the same call.
In A.’s case, the doctor testified that the account was set up with “no donor calls,” and that results closed as “non-contact positive” at “zero hours,” “with help a the computer system.” It’s the same i3screen system that, after its longtime chief medical review officer died in 2022, sent out results under his name. The company had to tell clients it was working to fix “all results reported with his name beyond the date of his passing.” There were no calls, no follow-up from the agency and no 10-day hold. A. had prescriptions at the time, as she later told the court. No one asked.
Who decided what it meant
Once a result is released, a lab witness testified, i3screen “generates the report for the caseworkers.” From there, agency staff decide what a number means for a family.
That isn’t simple. Hair results are reported in picograms per milligram of hair, urine results in nanograms per milliliter, and each test has its own cutoff. A picogram is one-thousandth of a nanogram, so 250,000 picograms is 250 nanograms. Compare figures in different units without converting them and you get a thousandfold error. I’m not saying that happened in A.’s case. I’m saying the system took away the one qualified person whose job was to catch mistakes like it, along with any medical explanation, before a result reached a caseworker.
A court order obtained by DSS described A.’s screens as “positive for methamphetamine and amphetamines,” and the order that authorized taking her children rested on that description. Three months later, DSS’s own drug-screen unit wrote in an internal email that her result was a “non-contact positive,” and that a non-contact positive “is not an official result.” By then, it had already been treated as one.
What the signature vouched for
A. received a result on one company’s letterhead, for tests other labs ran, including one that doesn’t list the accreditation the state contract requires. It was signed by a doctor from a third company whose account was set to skip the one call that would have asked about her medications. Then it was read and acted on by agency staff, not a doctor.
A judge later ruled against A. on the drug screens, and she is still challenging how her case was handled. This isn’t a claim about what a full review would have shown. It’s about whether a parent got the review the state’s contract promises before the result was used against her.
By the time anyone in a courtroom asked how that result was produced, it had already torn A.’s family apart.
The rights hidden in the contract
Premier’s state contract terms attach real duties to every test. Among them:
-Laboratories must be SAMHSA-certified or, for non-DOT testing, CAP-accredited.
-A full litigation package must be available on request.
-Laboratory staff must be able to testify about chain of custody.
-Every invoice to DSS must show the specimen ID and donor name.
-The medical review officer must try to reach the person tested, and hold the result if no one can.
-Chain of custody is the documented trail of who collected, sealed, handled, shipped and tested a specimen. When a parent questions a result, those records are what turn “the test says so” into evidence someone can check.
These terms describe what the contract requires. They’re not proof that every test met them. That’s exactly why parents and their lawyers should know the terms exist.
If you’re a parent facing a test result in a South Carolina DSS case, you can ask:
-Which laboratory performed the test?
-Is that lab certified, and for what kind of testing?
-Can I get the chain-of-custody documents and the litigation package?
-Who is the medical review officer, if one was used?
-Did the medical review officer try to reach me before my result was reported, and is the account set up for donor calls at all?
-Is my result a final, verified result, or a “non-contact positive”?
-What units is my result reported in, and what is the cutoff for that specific test?
Why the invoices matter
The contract says every invoice to DSS must show a specimen ID and donor name. That means DSS should have, in its own files, a record linking each test charge to a specific sample.
If that’s true, then the agency already holds the information needed to answer the public question: which labs were paid out of that $17.7 million, and how much went through the mandatory contract versus around it.
Publishing vendor names and totals wouldn’t require exposing any parent’s identity. It would just require DSS to say who it paid.
What I’m asking for in this part
-Name the vendors behind the “DSS Case Services” laboratory payments, by year.
-Explain how much testing has gone through the mandatory statewide contract and how much hasn’t, and why.
-Tell parents, in plain language, which lab performs their test and how to request chain-of-custody records.
-Show that every lab used under the statewide contract, including subcontracted labs, holds the SAMHSA certification or CAP accreditation the contract requires.
-Explain why DSS’s testing account is set to “no donor calls,” and stop treating non-contact results as final positives.
Next time (Friday, October 30)
In Part 3, I’ll follow a stream of money most people never connect to DSS: child support. DSS paid South Carolina’s 46 county treasurers about $292.7 million over twelve years. Some of that system’s incentive money ended up as bonuses and raises for clerks of court, and two former clerks now face criminal cases. I’ll also explain why so many of the county contracts list their contact as “CONVERSION, INCOMPLETE,” and what that does and doesn’t mean.
Editor’s note: The South Carolina Department of Social Services was asked for comment on October 27, 2026. Any response will be added to this article and to later installments.
Sources
- S.C. Procurement Services, statewide contracts (Drug & Alcohol Testing and Background Screening)
- S.C. Procurement Services, sole-source, emergency and unauthorized procurement reports
- DAODAS letter to the House Legislative Oversight Committee (Jan. 24, 2020)
- S.C. Comptroller General, Monthly State Spending Transparency Files, FY2014–FY2025
- Premier Biotech South Carolina contract terms
- United Drug Testing Laboratory, Inc. (Boise, Idaho), “Licenses and Certifications”
- i3screen LLC service agreement, Schedule I, filed as Exhibit A in i3screen LLC v. Applya Occupational Strategies, LLC, et al., No. 1:22-cv-01872 (D. Colo., filed July 28, 2022) i3screen notice to clients on the death of Dr. David Nahin, MRO (May 2022), as posted by Confirm
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