An employee at the Mayor’s Office of Children and Family Success approved about $210,000 in questionable water bill rebates, with some applications authorized within seconds of submission, Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming said today.

The “potentially fraudulent payments” involved 202 applicants and individual payments as high as $12,000 – none of which were authorized by the employee’s supervisors.

“The OIG has referred the matter to law enforcement,” says an abridged public copy of the report, which does not name the employee or the addresses of recipients of the rebates.

The findings raise concerns about the management of the Water4All program, launched by Mayor Brandon Scott in 2022  to assist “the city’s most vulnerable residents” by capping water payments for homeowners with incomes 200% below the federal poverty level.

Cumming said the employee started as a contract worker, but was hired full-time as a Human Services clerk in July 2023 by Children and Family Success, which administers the program.

The employee’s duties were to input and upload online applications, assist those submitting in-person applications and accurately log in applications for processing.

“In late October 2023, a Water4All manager discovered that the Worker approved 202 applicants without the manager’s knowledge. Multiple witnesses confirmed that the Worker was not authorized to approve applications. Moreover, the Worker approved numerous applications within seconds or minutes of the application entering the portal,” Cumming wrote.

“Some of the applications the Worker approved,” she added, “had significant or irregular water usage, which should have been referred to the Department of Public Works for leak reviews, but were not.”

The employee was terminated in November 2023, but for reasons largely unrelated to the unauthorized refunds, the IG noted.

The city was subsequently able to claw back a $10,000 check.

Easy Access

An early version of the Water4All portal allowed the employee to access and approve the applications, many of which were above the authorized limit of the discount program, according to the report.

In October 2023, for example, the employee approved both a $10,000 and a $12,000 refund, and earlier had processed individual disbursements of $6,000 and $7,000.

A former Water4All manager told the IG that a third-party vendor had allowed the payments to be processed even though “the vendor and Water4All agreed that the program was never to send a single constituent a refund of over $5,000 without [the manager’s] review and approval.”

New Controls in Place

Debra Y. Brooks, who became director of the Office of Children and Family Success in July 2022, responded to the report. She said her office has taken various steps “to prevent a future occurrence of erroneous application approvals.”

They include allowing Human Services Worker I jobholders only to submit applications and for their immediate superiors only to approve refunds under $1,700.

Applications greater than $1,700 are now to be submitted to a manager for review, while refunds greater than $4,000 will require an audit of the applicant’s history of water usage by DPW.

She also terminated the contract with Beam, the third-party vendor, and relaunched the platform through Workday.

Under new protocols, nearly all approved applicants no longer receive a physical check, but instead get a credit on their water bill.

“This provides greater assurance that water bills are paid, and funds are not diverted for another purpose, as could happen with a check,” Brooks said.

Audits have also been increased. As of October 2024, 50 applications have been flagged, and 11 cases were determined to be ineligible for credits, which saved the program approximately $141,000, Brooks said.

“MOCFS leadership will continue to examine our approval process practices to determine areas of vulnerability and create the necessary policies and procedures to address such weakness,” she pledged.