The Compliance Officer met with the Grants and Contracts team from Manhattan Legal Services about the income ineligible case and discussed systems for ensuring that supervisors review the monthly compliance cleanup reports and make the identified corrections as instructed. They will reiterate to all staff that the LSC income eligibility category in our case management system, LegalServer, is unrelated to income eligibility criteria for individual contracts and that while LSNYC may represent a client who is not LSC income eligible using funds for which that is permissible, those cases must be marked as LSC income ineligible. The intake paralegal responsible for the erroneous override will get remedial instructions on removing such overrides rather than leaving them in place. Additionally, the Compliance Officer has been meeting with staff in other boroughs who distribute monthly cleanup reports to evaluate their practices for ensuring corrections are made in response to the reports. The Compliance Officer and Citywide Director of Intake Services will continue to train on how the LSC income eligibility criteria are to be applied, and that No should be selected for LSC income eligibility even when a client is income eligible under other funders’ contracts.
The Director of Grants and Contracts for Queens Legal Services has spoken to the attorney and supervisor responsible for the incorrect LSC Eligibility Override Note in the asset-ineligible case. The Compliance Officer is working with LSNYC's LegalServer Support IT specialist to see if the platform can be customized so that LSC Eligibility Overrides can only be used to go from Yes to No (as is necessary when we have open a duplicate case for a client, since only one case can be LSC eligible), which is the only acceptable way for LSC Eligibility Overrides to work. The Compliance Officer and the Citywide Director of Intake will continue to train staff on the LSC asset eligibility criteria and stress that although we can accept clients whose assets exceed the LSC asset ceiling, no one should be selected for Asset and LSC eligibility for those cases.