An administrative appeal was filed for the denial by New York State Office of Children and Family Services of records upon which it based its published Annual Implementation Plan of 2015-2019

I recently wrote about NYS OCFS stalling and, finally, denial of most of the information I asked for in my FOIL request back in May of 2016.

Here is my appeal:

For the readers - RTATs stand for "Regional Interagency Technical Assistance Teams

and consist of these "representatives"

- note that identities of members of such teams are not disclosed in their description either.  I asked for lists of members of all the RTAT teams, and New York State Office of Children and Family Services pretended it does not have such records, which I considered as an improper denial of my FOIL request and appealed in Point TWO above. 

Here is my further appeal:

Here are my concerns about these records - and the reasons why NYS OCFS is denying my access to them.

• All those "teams" whose lists of members I asked for - and was denied by NYS OCFS - have access to individual information about child protective cases, YOUR cases, New Yorkers.  You might not even know whether Social Services have a file on you, but people whose identities NYS OCFS refused to reveal to me, do.  They get that information, and, unless we know their identities, we will never know where the potential breaches of privacy may have happened, and, if they happened, the victim of such a breach will be forever wondering, where did the particular evil-wisher learnt the supposedly private information.

• The Annual Implementation Plan lists Family Court judges as participants in such teams - and NYS OCFS refuse to reveal their identities.  A similar FOIL request is pending with NYS Office of Court Administration, but I do not expect them to be any more forthcoming than NYS OCFS.  Because, as I said before, they know they are caught red-handed.  The so-called "multidisciplinary teams" in which unidentified Family Court judges (who rule as factfinders, without a jury, on child protective cases) work as INVESTIGATORS of child protective cases.  So, judges participating in such cases also work as INVESTIGATORS, and may be deciding cases not on evidence presented, but on the basis of their agreements with other members of "multidisciplinary teams".
• Federal law provides financial incentives to courts to adopt children out of foster care - a task which is contrary to the elected judges' duty for impartial adjudication.  In other words, judges have a financial incentive to
• take your child away from you into foster care; and then
• to sell your child into an adoption out of foster care, terminating your parental rights forever - because the court will get federal money for that (1/2 of the grant money received from adoption goes to courts for "technical assistance" - and, by the way RTATs are "technical assistance" teams, so imagine what they are discussing behind closed doors, how much money they are getting for each child they grab from parents into foster care and adopt them out).

Social services will get federal incentive money for adoptions out of foster care, too, despite the declarations in state statutes that the "duty" of social services is to make reasonable efforts to reunite the family. 

I have a blog from 2014 about the financial incentives of Social Services to seize children into foster care and then adopt them out, but apparently, the 2014 information is old, the statute was updated, and I will soon publish an updated review of that law.

Let's see what NYS OCFS FOIL Appeals Officer will answer.  I will not hold my breath, and, since federal monies are feeding these swarming "teams" populated by secret individuals, I have another avenue to obtain that information - Freedom of Information Act request under federal law.  All the more that President Obama recently signed into law an amendment to that act providing for presumption of disclosure.

As a taxpayer, I want to know how state and federal taxpayer money are used by child protective services - to really protect the children, or to feed their lucrative private businesses of selling the children to relatives and friends, while pretending some semblance of "court proceedings" - where the presiding judge is, without disclosure, a member of the investigative team.

I want to know identities of all members of all teams going back at least 7 years.

And, of course, I will report my findings on this blog - if I get them.

Stay tuned.