Good morning everyone, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us today.
I'm just going to give it another minute or so just in case we have a few stragglers
and then we will go ahead and get started.
Alright, good morning, my name is Gina Page, I'm DCF's communications director, I've obviously
emailed with all of you over the last 48 hours or so, we really appreciate you taking the
time to be here with us today.
We're going to have two presenters, this presentation is not going to be recorded but we will be
providing you with the slides afterwards.
I do want to just talk a little bit about attribution, so the presentation portion, which
is going to be about the first 20-ish minutes or so, is on background, so please know direct
quotes, there will be an availability at the end where we will have an opportunity for folks
to ask questions, those can be direct quotes, and we'll kind of, once we switch that availability,
I'll talk a little bit about how we're going to do that in this virtual environment, but
I'm going to, give me one second, I'm going to go back because I'm just admitting one
more individual into the room and just want to make sure that they are able to see the
attribution information.
We have two wonderful speakers here today.
The first is our secretary, D.C.F. Secretary Jeff Purdle, and then Priya Batia, who is
our administrator for the Division of Early Care and Education, and I'm going to kick
it over to them to begin today's press briefing.
Good morning, everybody, thank you for joining us, and being with us here this morning, I
apologize for having available yesterday, as many families are navigating all the various
illnesses going around, perfect time to be talking about families in childcare, wanted
to share some of this information with folks, we're going to be doing this also with the
legislature tomorrow, as we've gotten a lot of questions, both from folks in the media
about policy makers and the public, in light of some of the issues that are going on in
Minnesota, particularly around accusations of fraud in childcare, people want to know
how does Wisconsin system work, what have we done to tackle some of these issues, some
folks have been around long enough that they'll remember the issues and sort of scandals
back in 2009, around fraud in childcare in Wisconsin, and some of the reforms that were
made that prank led to a stronger, more resilient system that we have today, that I think you're
going to hear a little bit about today.
I'm going to talk about the system overview and a little bit of what the landscape looks
like for childcare, Peter will share a little bit about how the Wisconsin shares program
operates, and then I'll talk a little bit about program integrity, control closes out
with sort of the accountability part, the federal and state monitoring, how does all
this work, and then we can do everybody's questions.
Okay, so an overview of the Wisconsin childcare system, I think the first thing to sort of
ground us in is we look at, how does this work?
It's just a reminder that right now we're talking about regulated childcare, and that
means that we're talking generally about providers that are serving four or more unrelated
kids who are under the age of seven, outside of the home for compensation, that is what
sort of triggers the requirement around regulated childcare.
So there are unregulated kinds of care, you can have babysitting, you can do friend family
and neighbor care, the neighbor can take care of one kid, that's allowed.
That is not illegal, it is unregulated.
These types in front of you are the regulated part of the system, there's about 48 hundred
folks, providers in the state of Wisconsin providing care for kids, about 180,000 kids
give or take, in that system, and then there are different types certified, generally
you're serving smaller families, that's where you can serve under four kids and still get
access to shares in some of the programs, it's a family based setting, summer camps and
after school, licensed family and group, that is typically what we're talking about when
we talk about childcare, and then schools also have the ability to run childcare as
well under their own set of roles, but what I want to break down when we look at this
next slide is sort of a sense of how does that universe look, and about 47% of all providers
are going to be group centers, about 47% are going to be family providers, either those
licensed family or certified providers, and then everybody else is either in that camp
after school, public school lane, okay, so it's about 50-50 between group and family,
but when we look at kids, 82% of the kids are in group centers, only 9% are in a family
care setting, and that's just economies of scale, so centers can be big, there's, you
know, ratios, you have to have a certain amount of staffing, but a center can be as big as
you can manage, as long as you have the appropriate staffing for it, a family provider is historically
capped in eight kids at most, most are serving less than that, the last budget didn't change
that, that they'll be able to go up to 12 with a second adult, but these are implicitly
smaller providers, so there's a lot of them serving a small number of kids in each provider,
and then the centers are operating at scale at a much larger capacity, so when we sort
of think about the universe, that's the texture and landscape for what the breakdown looks
like, okay, so when we think about how the system works, there's a couple different
things when we think about, you know, integrity in the system, there's the front end, what
are the regulations that are required and initial licensure requirements for a provider
to get into being able to provide care, what is the ongoing monitoring and licensing that
happens to ensure that kids are safe, and then what are the progressive enforcement pieces
that happen, either due to health and safety or financially, if a provider is not doing
something correct, and what are the recovery pieces and terminations and sort of final
actions that can happen, if there is in fact something financial or health and safety that
isn't appropriate, so there's sort of a spectrum of things, so the key pieces on regulation
here, gauge and background, there's a set of background checks and minimum ages folks
have to meet, there's training requirements both for staff and providers on range of
both sort of developmental topics, everything from shaking baby to sort of curriculum and
instruction pieces, how do you help coach kids and move them through the system, all
the way through to the sort of financial monitoring and program integrity pieces that redo, and
some of that will depend on the staff person's role, are they the provider who's responsible
for the financial wellbeing of the center, or are they frontline staff, and those requirements
will vary in training, well very depending on that. A provider to submit an application,
there's a set of policies that they have to have, building plans, insurance and fees,
folks have questions about that, most of it's in the regs and we can help you find kind of how
that works, there are inspections, so there are different components to this, it's got to pass
building code and health and safety, so some of those are DCF, so health and safety requirements
for child care, there's also building code run by county and overseen by DISPIS, the department of
safety and professional services, regulations around physical safety and what is required
at a building, so you've got different components overlaying there, and then health requirements,
proof of vaccinations, particularly for animals, if they're going to be in the home while child
care is being provided, so there's a set of different things that you've got to go through
and some of the will vary between a home setting and a center-based setting.
So once you go through that initial process, there's a pre-licensing piece that you go through,
there's technical assistance that's available for folks, they'll submit that final application
and they're improved, they can open, provide care for kids and enroll them, and then there's
ongoing licensing pieces, so we perform unannounced visits, at least annually,
sometimes multiple times a year, where we can review documentation and determine compliance,
so we're looking at things like staffing levels, or the files, qualifications,
background checks, or the training's done, or the people over there say that they're there
and is that correct, are the program activities happening, so supervision ratios, emergency plans,
curriculum and instruction that's happening, health and safety, so that's everything from
immunizations to sanitation, medication distribution, and administration, all those pieces,
building code checks, fire safety equipment, all the physical environment pieces, as well as
the operational stuff, so you know checking to see that the policies are there, are the appropriate
things posted, parents aware of the appropriate things, enrollment and attendance, transportation,
all these pieces are going to get checked when they go through a licensing visit, there's a
sort of a checklist that the licensor has to go through and determine whether they're
in compliance, meeting or not meeting, or whether it doesn't apply each of the elements according
to the polls and regulations, so when something isn't correct, and again that can be a health and
safety piece, it can be a piece on program, it could be a financial piece that might get referred
to the program integrity side, but there's an initial violation that the licensing specialists
can issue, it's like a non-compliance statement, violations are common, not every violation is
a serious one, there are sometimes things that we're providing technical assistance about or
notification that they got to get into compliance with something, a corrective action plan that
provider would submit and they might be monitored, so they're saying oh there wasn't a cap on all
of the electrical outlets, because one of the kids removed them, we didn't check that, so here's our
plan for making sure that next time you come by that that's all going to be squared away,
on more serious issues things will begin to escalate, so we can issue orders and corrections
for fines, if there's some sort of major violation, we can withhold subsidy and payments to ensure
that either we are recouping money that was paid, that shouldn't have been paid, so they were claiming
a kid that wasn't there, sometimes that's administrative error, that doesn't necessarily mean it's broad,
sometimes there's just paperwork that isn't right, but you know we can do those financial
corrections, we can take licensing actions, so we can deny a new provider, we can suspend folks,
we can revoke their license, and go through that process, and there are times where we issue an
immediate closure, there's an imminent threat to health and safety, and that's usually a pretty
significant item, so you know it says a little bit there, no heat, ongoing abuse, something specific,
that's going to lead to that kind of inaction, generally the seriousness, the extent to the
prior history, cooperation is a big factor, a lot of these things come to us because providers will
notify us that there's a problem, a staff member did something wrong, that they discovered something,
and they will report that to us, so there is a cooperative relationship here that happens
where providers are sharing information with us, it may result in a violation, it may result in an
corrective action plan, but you know there's going to be a lot of small things going on,
and then there's going to be a handful of really big and significant issues that are going to sort
of move up and be triaged into the high risk category. Okay, so Priya's going to talk a little bit
about the actual shares program, so just as a precursor to this, and she'll talk a little bit
about this, but not everyone is in shares, so there's regulation for all regulated child care,
shares as a funding program for some of the kids who are eligible within the child care
universe, and that's really been the focus of the stuff that's going on, and I think what Priya is
going to talk about now, Priya? Thanks Jeff, so Wisconsin shares is our child care subsidy program,
it is designed to assist low-income families with the cost of child care, and it is federally funded,
it is funded primarily by the TANF block grant, so temporary assistance for needy families,
and by CCDF, which is the child care development fund, so these are block grants that the federal
government gives to states to run child care subsidy programs. In Wisconsin, parents must be
participating in an approved activity in order to receive Wisconsin shares, that's most typically
employment, and you can see here it can also be participation in W-2 or F-set program, those are
job training programs, the food share employment and training program. Parents can also be engaged
in education, and there is an allowance for activity breaks, so for example if a parent loses their job,
their Wisconsin shares subsidy is not automatically terminated, but instead they have a set amount
of time to find new employment, and they can continue Wisconsin shares during that activity break
period. If it's a two-parent household, both parents have to be engaged in approved activities.
So going back to the last slide, in addition to an approved activity, there are financial
requirements, specifically there's an eligibility threshold. In order to enter the program, the
family must be at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, so for a family of three, for example,
that's about $53,000, family of four, about $64,300. And just a note, when we say parent,
that is inclusive of foster parents, kinship parents, and other situations where another
individual besides the biological parent is acting to care for the child. So that's just a brief
overview of the Wisconsin shares program, and I'm going to turn it back to Jeff.
Okay. I'm program integrity, and in particular, sort of how to be get to where we are. I talked
a little bit about the different phases of the system. I would say in 2009, there's a significant
change that's going to happen in the system. Raquel Rutledge's pieces, and Caching it on kids will
win their Pulitzer Prize, and really triggers a nationwide conversation about child care and
program integrity. You see links here to all the different pieces that are there, and there's
some highlights where they talk about some of the kinds of things that folks discover were going
on in the system, bogus jobs, sort of ridiculous approvals for job work activities,
agents being slowed to act, and regulators not revoking licenses, a lot of flexibility or too
much flexibility and kind of broaden it into businesses, I would say, swapping kids back and
forth between family providers and a bunch of different things. And this really triggers a whole
set of reforms and responses about how Wisconsin's system works. And there's a couple areas we really
focus in on, billing for unprovided care. So for actually billing,
falsification records, cash checking operations was a big thing that was going on at the time.
We don't really see that anymore. The recruiting of fake employees and so making sure the sort
of integrity of staffing is there. There was a 2009 sort of special review that the legislative
audit bureau did at the time, and they estimated somewhere between, I would say, I mean, you can
see it there, but 17 to 22, 24 million, based on a difference between improper subsidy payments and
fraudulent reporting on kid enrollment. And so we're going to talk a little bit about how the
audits work now, both federally and state, that sort of navigate through these pieces. But what
we saw on Wisconsin, and I think you'll see similar things start to happen in some of these other
states. And so we are a little bit of an outlier. Some of these things will also be
con reflected in subsequent federal and state laws and other places. The wisdom lower protections
for government employees was added. Program integrity staff was bolstered and the whole unit
was created to ensure that there is sort of review, particularly at the financial aspects of child
care at Wisconsin. Attendance tracking was enhanced and added. So our license can look at
in our program that giving people can review actual attendance records and not just in
moment, we look at both pieces at different points in time. Finger printed background checks was
a thing we started before we became a national requirement. They expanded the bar crimes list,
so they added a lot of financial crimes to this requirement that would prohibit you from being
able to run a child care center or open in a home family care center. Kid stat, sort of based on
the stat pieces of the time, was a piece that was created and we still continue to use today
actually in all our human services programs to review different data metrics and program
integrity, to really look at how our different programs run and ensure that they also work
meeting needs, that they have high program integrity, and they're effective. Youngstar was born out of
this conversation. It is the state's quality rating information system. That is a national
thing. There are lots of other states that do that. Youngstar in particular was designed
in response to some of the things that books saw happening during that 2009, in the wake of the
2009 scandal. And then we will be one of the states that moves over into an EBT card for child care
payments. This is common in SNAP and other programs. It's required in certain other federal programs
now. It is optional in certain other benefit programs and we are one of the states that do that.
One of the arguments in favor of the EBT card is that it sort of bifurcates the relationship
between the provider payments and the pair of payments and adds a layer of protection from the
ability to sort of do fraudulent or collusive activities. It creates a separate monitoring
structure and a separate financial structure there. Those things are helpful and I think I
significantly reduced some of the program integrity issues. The folks see going on in other places
and certainly they were going on at the time. The state also passed a number of laws that made
providers more personally liable so that they couldn't just close their in-home business
and be done with it if they had outstanding debt or liabilities. And they also again looked at
and expanded some of the statutory pieces around crimes caring for children. Allowing to suspend
and revoke licenses to limit subsidy payments for a wider array of things. So a whole bunch
of things happen. Some of it's administrative, some of it's statutory, some of it's operationally
and programmatic in terms of its different components. But we run in a pretty different
operationally different system today than we did in 2009 and again I think those are differences.
You can see between what's happening in Minnesota and how things work in Wisconsin.
So one of the questions we get is okay so when something happens and someone refers a
complaint how does this work? So there's a couple of different ways the complaint is going to come
in and trigger an investigation. A licensor is going to find something when they're doing their
unannounced visit. There is a hotline if there is a phone number there's a website there's an email
box that DCF operates DHS also operates their own and if someone refers sort of cross-programmatically
we refer them to the other agency. If a concern comes in about fraud or there can be things
what we call red flags in the system. So there are data parameters within our payments in
enrollment systems that look at wild and swings in payments changes in enrollment
when people are claiming dollars that exceed the number of kids that they have enrolled
where the system itself can generate a flag it says this doesn't look right it needs to go for a
review and when all of those pieces come in they show up with our staff and they go through a
desk review and anything from a red flag review anything that's a serious concern for health and
safety anything that looks like fraud or collusion those things immediately go into our high risk
category and you're prioritized for review. So more firm gets created case gets assigned they go
through and determine so which we have a high median and low risk category and then we manage
every month so how many cases are coming in how many have we closed and where are we at and
progressing those investigations we have a team of auditors and investigators who will then go in
and do a review of the provider history the shares information whatever the universe is the
enrollment records and those pieces they'll generate a communication that ultimately determines all
their findings meet with the provider and then close the case and then there might be a series
of outcomes tonight there might be a payment discrepancy that gets resolved it might be an
accounting error and there is a payment owed back to us that is not necessarily fraud but it is an
overpayment it needs to be collected and corrected and it gave a pay us back or we can take that out
of subsequent future payments to make that whole if they are unwilling to pay or we have to take
a serious action you know we can take them to court we can put them in collections and ultimately
taxes and intercepts can be issued to collect future money that's owed to the state if necessary
and if there is financial issues become significant enough it can impact the eligibility for shares
they could be removed from the show's program or ultimately closed so there's a whole for a range
of activities that can happen there and i'm going to pass it back to pre and talk a little bit about
that's like at the provider level and then the feds in the state sort of do monitoring of how
the whole system works and pre isn't to talk about that so as Jeff said there is federal and state
monitoring of how we run the child care subsidy system and our health and safety monitoring here
at the state so the state performs multiple assessments the big one is the legislative audit bureau
performs regular financial audits every three years including of the Wisconsin shares
program but of CCDF and then as we just talked about at the individual level state licensure
goes out and performs at least one unannounced visit every year it is not unusual for there to
be more than one depending on the program's history and then federal requirements the federal government
performs triennial monitoring visits so on different cycles they have first a CCDF monitoring visit
where they review all the federal CCDF requirements including health and safety and program integrity
and do a visit and monitor how we are implementing the rules and then every three years on a different
cycle than the overall CCDF monitoring there is a federal improper payment report so the last time
we had that was in 2023 and it will happen again later this year is our expectation it is every
three years you can see here the history that we've had with federal improper payments
we have made great strides since the days that Secretary Purdle was talking about earlier in the
wake of the fraud stories and the federal government requires that our error rate be below 10 percent
we take pride in the fact that we are well below that at 2.9 percent the last time we had
a federal improper payment monitoring in fact i would say that the office of child care the
federal office of child care often asks us to meet with other states to provide some peer-to-peer
support for other states that are dealing with challenges or questions around program integrity
so that's just a quick summary of the state audits and federal monitoring that
Wisconsin is subject to in the child care space
there are a range of resources in the back on Wisconsin shares program integrity
there's a third one when we set regulation when we send out the slide that folks have access to
Gina anyone any questions yeah so for those who i know we had a couple folks join a little late
just a friendly reminder that the presentation was on background only so no direct quotes we are
now transitioning into the availability portion so these are direct quotes given we have a number
of folks on here what we're going to do is if you can type your questions into the chat
they will come to the host and co-host and we will take them as they come in we have a couple
minutes about five-ish or so so feel free to toss those in and we will do our best and then
if we are unable to get to your question and you still have questions please feel free to
respond to the email once we send those slides out which i will send right after this
I'm sure folks are typing but I will read the about as soon as we
start receiving
you
uh Gina I can see a bunch of questions in the meeting chat but I don't know if you can see them
I did see one come in now I can see a whole list of them so if you're gonna have you do it then
I'm just gonna uh manage this the only problem being I can't scroll up and down
looks like they're coming through as direct messages so there were a couple questions
about some of the politics of this and then some on the program side of these pieces so
on the operational side there was a question about how does federal funding flow does the federal
funds go to the parents does any money go to the provider Priya can give a little bit more
detail on this but in general Wisconsin shares is a subsidy program that is paid to the parents
on an EBT card that they use to then pay their provider for their service and that is the lion
share of the child care federal funding that we run on a regular basis there are some programs
on the quality side that we set aside some of the funding to pay for the pre licensing services
in some of other areas Priya maybe you must speak a little bit to that but the lion share of the
money goes in the direct service inside two parents on an EBT card that's correct at least 70 percent
of the funding um pardon me at least 70 percent of the funding must go to um the subsidy program
and so the vast majority of CCDF funding goes to Wisconsin shares subsidy
on EBT cards and then parents pay providers directly there is some funding that goes towards
workforce supports to enhance the quality of programs and to support them with training and
technical assistance. So I got a couple of questions sorry go ahead.
I was going to say I have some questions as well um just give me a second let me finish
a couple here real quick um okay so one of the questions was about how many of the kids are in
Wisconsin shares and I just want to be clear about this there's about 4,800 providers in the state
there's roughly a little less than 180,000 kids in child care in the state and so those are a
little different at any given point in time 20 to 22 percent of the kids are on Wisconsin
shares in the state so about a fifth of the kids are in subsidy everybody else is probably pay
there are more people eligible for subsidy than use it that is common across the country that is
sort of a national phenomenon that folks see and I think we continue to try and get more people to
utilize the program and also a question about whether we are confident about
Wisconsin not being at risk of losing federal funding and you know let me say two things about
that but one very clearly we've already made the January child care payments cards are loaded and
people are using them folks should have confidence in the system I don't think we have any concerns
about being able to make the February payments and other payments moving forward there are you
know some additional guidance I think that we're likely to see in maybe reporting requirements but
our system is well positioned to be able to meet those and continue to move forward
it may be administratively burdensome it may be more paperwork and things we got to collect but
we're confident that our system I think particularly because of its unique history is probably one of
the best positioned in the country for being able to navigate some of the questions that are coming
in do you know if you're getting some questions why don't we take yours otherwise I've got a few
more here yeah so um and Priya this one may be a little bit more geared towards you so providers
charge for days that the child does not attend how does that factor into charging for no services
oh you're on mute Priya can you read the question one more time yeah so providers charge for days
that the child does not attend how does that factor into charging for no services
so it is true that providers often do charge for days that a child does not attend for example
children often get sick and miss a day of child care and so that is permissible a parent
receives a subsidy based on the need that they have for child care and pays the child care provider
according to the contract that the parent and the provider have so the parent and provider are
required to have a contract that outline the terms of payment agreements absences and so
parents are paying the provider according to those agreements and so it is permissible for
Wisconsin shares to be used according to those set procedures that providers have
Jeff is there anything you want to add there my rec election is actually either a state law rule
about not being able to penalize providers for when kids are sick we're missing days
and I think that's pretty common and pretty standard I think the question is driving
is how do you know when it's fraud how do you know when a kid just stopped showing up
and I think when we did the licensing visit or get a tip or we're checking the enrollment
in attendance records if there's discrepancies between the pop you talked about those policies
Priya talked about that how many approved days can you be absent and there's a limit on that
and if the kids absent more than that and we're paying for it that's going to trigger a review
it might trigger a clawback and recovery of money and it's going to go into that program
integrity investigation you know if it's two days you know it might just be a small recovery
and if it's all of a sudden the kid's been gone for a month and you're probably clawing back all
the shares authorization in that space and that's what the system is designed to do
and if the child has not attended for a month both the parent and provider are required
to notify their county child care worker that issued the subsidy so that appropriate action can
be taken you know one of the questions that folks have you know I think Scott you asked you know
does this matter if the president decides to target Wisconsin for political reasons
let me say this I think what you see in Wisconsin in the wake of the 2009 you know fraud scandal
was a bipartisan response to program integrity to making sure that the subsidies for child care
we're going to be paid and used responsibly we have Republicans and Democrats working together
passing laws in bills cross-administrations it was the end of the Doyle administration
put in a lot of these reforms it was Governor Walker's administration and Lucas the EBT cards
you know we've continued that and I think as we've seen these conversations around
what's been happening on the federal funding side not just recently out of Minnesota but in
the whole last year what we've seen is a politicization of these these issues there are certainly some
very significant issues going on in Minnesota and there was no question that the president
politicizes this for an agenda and targets folks for it I think what you've seen the governor say
in what you see Wisconsin leaders doing is showing that we have a strong system that has navigated
these issues that has high integrity that addresses these things when they come and so we're confident
about our ability to continue to run of robust and gray child care system you know I think the
speaker referred to having been here through this experience and helped pass some of these laws
if you see the governor committed to doing that we're committed to doing that but nothing can
stop the president from politicizing an issue and I think we all see that playing out in a variety
of ways all across the country right now and I think the concerns of frankly
Jeff I see a couple of questions around improper payments when they're discovered
and kind of the system to to recoup those
so pretty you you might need to talk a little bit about this but when we discover an improper
payment it's going to trigger that and we'll send these out to you but that process that we
showed you that process graph for review they're going to go through the documentation and improper
payments happen there there is a difference between improper payments in fraud I guess I want to
draw a distinction there this is a transactional business system so we're sometimes checking and
auditing the records did you get paid the right amount was everything built correctly
you know and there are going to be transactional things that happen in that that get squared off
throughout the course of the year I just got a letter from my health insurance provider that
my dental come down my dental provider owes money back to them for my kid's dental work right like
those things get squared that's not necessarily fraud and if we think that there's intentional
and fraudulent activity there's also going to be penalties and recruitment we're going to recoup
the money that is an improper payment a transactional error and if we think those improper payments
are fraudulent there could be legal and prosecutorial actions as well so pretty you are talking a
little bit about kind of anything more you want to add to those distinctions and kind of how that works
yeah I think it depends on the severity of the improper payment any patterns that we are seeing
in in that particular parent or provider and so it can really our responses can really range from
technical assistance all the way to overpayments retrieving those funds to termination of a program
from Wisconsin shares and so there is a range of enforcement that does happen depending on the
severity of the improper payments that that happened and again generally we can put people
on a payment plan to recoup those funds that is common if we need to we can take it out of other
payments depending on what kind of program that they're in sometimes and then if necessary if we
have a provider that we've had to close or terminate from the shares system and they own money and
we can refer them to the Department of Revenue for Tax Intercept to recoup and recover the money
on an ongoing basis and we do do that
do you know you got other questions popping through
I do I think I have we probably have time for maybe two more we do have one
related to a separate program which I'll I'll do next but one is can you briefly walk through
the page on the website that lists the suspended child care providers and the data that is put
on that site so this is related to the Wisconsin shares suspended terminated providers
I need to look at that page hold on a second
is there a specific question about the page or if you just want to understand what they're reading
just understand what they're reading
so the first number so there's a list of suspended child care providers
this is required that we post suspended programs we do that for programs
we share information about programs that are revoked for health and safety reasons as well
as programs that are suspended from Wisconsin shares if you're just trying to understand
the headers here of the providers each provider is given a provider number a license number that
is the first number the 001 is the location number if you see a 002 that means it's a provider that
may have had more than one location then it has the name of the provider the licensed
the licensee so the the name of the individual that holds the license for the provider
and then the county where the provider resides and what I'm seeing underneath that is the date that
the provider was suspended and a list of the reasons for suspension the different violations
and I know access visit just servants clear about that that is what I'm doing unannounced
visit and we are unable to gain egress to the provider location again it is possible
particularly in working home providers that there if somebody's on a field trip or whatever
that there's a reason that you know on the unannounced visit why people might not be
available so that in and of itself the first time is not always going to be conclusive of a problem
but if there is a no access visit then we're going to do a repeat visit to gain entry and that
is usually if we have more than one no access visit that is going to be pretty keen indicated
that there's a problem they're going to get referred into the system if you're looking at the page
that pretty we're just walking through you can see the kinds of things we just suspended this
provider for the very kinds of things we were talking about indication of records outside
employment these are all things that we were able to investigate verify and result in a
suspension I don't know any of the details on this particular one I didn't review it in advance
but I think it illustrates actually how the system works when it identifies that there's a problem
we document that it's transparent it's public and actually gets taken
and then the last question that we have time for is has there been any review of child care
accounts dollars yes so there are child care accounts actually operates on a I would say
somewhat higher bar than shares does because there's proactive auditing requirements that
we put in place for it so there were sampling audit requirements put in there were reviews of
all of our federally funded programs during the outbreak area we had some clawbacks of different
pieces that we used you want to speak to them for child care counts we have consistently done
a sample of a certain percentage of all providers that received funding we randomly select them and
the auditors review to make sure that they were eligible for the funds and that the information
they entered into their application was correct and that they used the funds according to the
allowable uses and so again if we found any irregularities we can do it takes similar action
as we've we take in shares where we issue an overpayment and the provider can pay us back with
the lump sum or be put on a payment plan and if we do not receive payment again they can be referred
over to department of revenue for tax intercept so some of the actions we take are quite similar
but we actually did a proactive random sampling throughout the life of the program
okay well we appreciate folks joining us we're going to do this again with the legislature
tomorrow if you have additional questions feel free to reach out to Gina we're happy to walk
people through some of the the pieces here and again as the natural story continues to unfold
if you have questions or want to talk to folks let us know we're here to be a resource and how
Wisconsin system works really appreciate your time this morning thank you for joining us bye everybody