Gov. Peter Shumlin vetoed one bill last year. It was an innocuous-sounding piece of legislation that would have required the Agency of Human Services (AHS) to send monthly updates to the Legislature on how it screens and responds to reports of elder abuse.
Lawmakers gave it another go this session — both the House and Senate passed a similar bill — and this time around, Shumlin is unlikely to strike it down. That’s because lawmakers stripped a number of the more onerous reporting requirements in order to secure the administration’s support.
Last year, the governor’s veto blindsided the bill’s sponsors, who thought they had settled on a compromise that was acceptable to the administration. Shumlin objected on the grounds that it would have saddled the AHS with “unnecessary bureaucracy and paperwork.”
The bill deals with the Adult Protective Services (APS) division of the Department of Aging and Independent Living (DAIL). APS, which investigates reports of elder abuse, has been plagued with problems in recent years. Although DAIL dutifully chipped away at a backlog of hundreds of unaddressed cases, advocates aren’t confident that the department has gotten its act together.
Jacqueline Majoros, a state ombudsman with Vermont Legal Aid, said, “There are still concerns in the community about APS and it seemed like one way to rebuild the trust in the system.”
Lawmakers say the point of the bill is to better understand why such a small number of reports of abuse get confirmed in Vermont. The state’s substantiation rate is markedly low — 14 percent of cases were substantiated in 2012, whereas the national average is 42 percent.
Rep. Sandy Haas, P-Rochester, said, “An awful lot of cases never get opened and it’s very hard for us to get handle on why that is, and without knowing that, we can’t know whether or not the statute works.”
The bill asks for quarterly updates — rather than monthly ones — on how many reports of abuse get investigated, how often these investigations confirm the abuse and why cases get screened out. While a number of the data requests that were included in the bill that Shumlin vetoed have disappeared, legislators and advocates say they are content with the scaled-back version.
“It really focuses on the information that is most significant: who is falling through the cracks and why those cases aren’t being investigated, which is central to everyone’s concerns,” Majoros said.
One of the more major pieces missing from this year’s bill is a $75,000 independent evaluation of the APS program. That was a major sticking point for the governor last year. Nixing the study made the bill “more palatable from a taxpayer standpoint,” DAIL Commissioner Susan Wehry said.
Wehry says this year’s bill is “much less burdensome” and it essentially mandates things that DAIL is already doing. “The reporting requirements [in the bill] basically codified the reports that we are already submitting.”
According to Wehry, it will be easier for the department to comply now that it has a more sophisticated database up and running, which hadn’t been in place last year.
Wehry said she, too, is “perplexed” by Vermont’s unusually low substantiation rate, but she said it’s difficult to draw comparisons across states because they have different definitions of abuse.
Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Addison, who chairs the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, said she doesn’t think the legislation will necessarily turn up problems with APS, but it’s important to get the story behind the substantiation rate. “Maybe it is low, maybe it’s just better here in Vermont, but it is hard for us to tell.”
