What did the social services audit really say?
It doesn't actually say the nonprofits suck.
The other day the City Auditor published a report on the city's management of nonprofit social services contracts. It highlights some serious longstanding issues but it has predictably been misinterpreted evidence of widespread fraud, which is absolutely not what it alleges.
Here is the key excerpt at the top of the report:
We reviewed a sample of 25 contracts with a contract amount of about $30 million and found that for 19 (76%) of the contracts, the nonprofit organizations did not meet one or more performance expectations.
We reviewed 151 annual output and outcome performance expectations. We found that the nonprofit organizations did not meet 67 (44%) of the expected output and outcome performance expectations. This included 45% of the output and 42% of the outcome performance expectations.
That certainly sounds bad. And that is precisely the conclusion the Statesman's sensationalist headline encouraged readers to draw. But it's really hard to judge without knowing the details of the contracts in question, which the report doesn't disclose. What service is being provided? What metric is being measured? Was the failure to achieve the promised outcome evidence of incompetence or unrealistic expectations?
