Topeka, Kansas — In 12 foster care cases reviewed by Kansas legislative auditors, a worker visited the child every month. A supervisor counting visits could have marked every month complete. But when auditors looked for evidence that the worker had actually assessed the child’s safety, they found the assessments inadequate. Those 12 cases reveal something a missed-visit count alone cannot tell a parent, a judge or the state agency paying the contractor.
Another 29 cases had at least one missed visit. Together, that made 41 of 86 reviewed cases in which a monthly safety assessment was missing or inadequate at least once. The Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit published the foster care health and safety audit in March 2022. Its 2025 follow-up and a new federal audit project make it possible to ask what changed after the state learned about those failures.
What Kansas auditors counted
Auditors randomly selected 86 case files from almost 14,000 Kansas foster care cases dating from October 2019. They examined nine months of visits per file during a period extending into late 2021. All four case-management providers were represented. The review included the pandemic, and auditors counted qualifying virtual visits when Kansas policy permitted them.
In 29 files, at least one monthly worker-child visit was missed. Fifteen of the 86 files had more than one missed visit. In a separate group of 12 files, visits occurred each month, but the notes did not show adequate assessment of the child’s safety. Auditors also flagged six files where documentation was too thin for them to determine whether the worker had evaluated safety appropriately.
The 48% figure describes the share of sampled cases with at least one missing or inadequate monthly assessment. It is not the percentage of all monthly visits that workers missed. Nor did the auditors project that rate to all Kansas foster children or determine that each child in those files suffered harm.
St. Francis Ministries accounted for 12 of the 15 cases with repeated missed visits
Kansas could identify where missed visits were concentrated. Of the 32 St. Francis Ministries files auditors examined, 19 had at least one missed visit. Across the other three providers, 10 of 54 files had a missed visit. Of the 15 files in the entire sample with more than one missed visit, 12 belonged to St. Francis. The underlying counts appear in the legislative audit’s section on monthly visits.
The cases they buried, read out loud.
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St. Francis handled about half of Kansas foster care cases during the period described by the auditors. Its size matters when comparing raw totals. The figures above describe historical files; the audit did not establish a statewide rate for any contractor. What the figures gave DCF was a specific place to look for repeat failures.
For each of those 12 cases, who was told after the first missed visit? When did someone next see the child privately? Did a supervisor check what the worker learned? DCF could publish those intervals by provider without naming children. The records that would show whether oversight worked are the corrective-action notices, subsequent visit records and provider scorecards. The 2025 follow-up documented interviews and oversight reports, but it did not reexamine these children’s cases.
What should a safety visit tell the state?
Kansas policy called for workers to look for physical harm, emotional harm and unsafe conditions in the placement. Auditors looked for evidence of time alone with the child, observations about safety and follow-up on earlier concerns. In one file, they found similar language carried over between visit logs, a documentation problem they had also encountered in a 2016 audit.
Imagine the difference for a child who has something difficult to say about a placement. An entry recording that a worker arrived answers a scheduling question. Whether the child could speak privately, what the worker observed and whether anyone followed up are the facts that let a supervisor evaluate the visit. Those are also the facts a new worker needs if the case changes hands.
What the contractors and the state said
Providers cited high caseloads, turnover, emergencies, scheduling conflicts and miscommunication as reasons visits were missed. They also told auditors that some visits took place but were poorly documented. That distinction matters to the worker. It also matters to the next person responsible for the child: a file with no usable account cannot show what concern was raised or who agreed to act.
The state’s own reviewers saw a similar problem. In a separate quarterly review covering July through September 2021, DCF judged visits insufficient in 76 of 169 files. Legislative auditors reported those results but did not independently verify them. The two reviews used different samples and measures, so the figures cannot be added together.
What consequences followed for providers?
At the time of the 2022 audit, DCF had not penalized case-management providers for missing certain key safety standards. The legislature’s 2025 follow-up documented some progress. DCF interviewed children and placement providers about their experiences with case managers and used those accounts in oversight reports. By April 2025, state agencies had fully implemented two of the four recommendations auditors revisited.
The recommendation to clarify contractor oversight was only partially implemented. Auditors said expectations for providers and the corrective actions attached to those expectations had not changed substantially since 2022. The follow-up verified steps agencies had taken. It did not repeat the original safety review or measure whether children subsequently received more reliable checks.
The next test for Kansas foster care oversight
A different monitoring process later documented another pressure on the same system. FAN reported that Kansas foster children spent 870 nights without a placement in 2025, according to the monitor in the McIntyre settlement. That finding measures where children spent the night. The legislative audit measures what workers checked once children were in placements. Together they point to two records worth asking for: where the child was, and when someone last verified the child’s safety there.
HHS OIG’s active federal review of contracted foster care case management, announced July 30, 2026, asks how Kansas and Florida monitored providers’ compliance. FAN’s companion story examines six financial reviews Florida identified and did not complete that year. For Kansas, a useful public accounting would show, by provider, missed visits, visits with inadequate safety assessments, and how often a supervisor verified that a later visit resolved the concern. Reporting only the first number would again leave the 12 cases that opened this story out of view.
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