Huge Update: The Audit Petition for Iowa DHHS is Finally Done!
I have some big news to share. After months of digging through records, I’ve finally finished the official petition to audit the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
This post will be cross posted on Iowa Family Rights, Ashley for Iowa, and Iridescent Alchemyst on Substack!
This isn’t just a simple letter. It’s a massive 205-page research packet with 38 attachments and over 50 government reports- You can find the full list of attachments with links at the end of this post.
It proves that for 29 years (since 1997), Iowa’s child welfare system has been stuck in a loop of the same dangerous mistakes… and THEY KNOW IT!!
Here is a sneak peek of the document list and title page for the Petition to Audit packet I have prepared for Iowa’s Auditor of State Rob Sand
THIS is the work the state’s Child Welfare Task Force was supposed to do after a girl named Sabrina Ray was tragically starved to death by her foster parents in 2017. Maybe you remember that is the 3rd child that has died while under the “care and supervision of Iowa’s Department of Human Services” to have made headlines in Iowa.
Rest in Peace
😇Shelby Duis (1998-2000)
😇Natalie Finn (2000-2016)
😇Sabrina Ray (2001-2017)
The Numbers Are Worse Than You Think
When I say the system is “broken,” I have the statistics to back it up. Here are some of the most shocking and disturbing facts found in official reports:
- Failed Safety Checks: In a major federal review, Iowa failed 91% of its safety assessments—meaning the agency didn’t properly check if kids were actually safe in most cases.
- Rules Are Ignored: My research shows a 78% “Policy-Practice Gap.” That’s a fancy way of saying the agency ignores its own safety and paperwork rules almost 80% of the time.
- Foster Care Danger: Kids in Iowa are 4.7 times more likely to be abused while in foster care compared to the national target.
- Wasting Tax Money: Because of bad record-keeping, Iowa is at risk of having to pay back $40 million in federal funds.
- Constant Staff Changes: About 30–35% of case managers quit every year. This means a family might get three different workers in just three months, so no one ever really knows what’s going on with the kids.
Taking This to the State Capitol
I’m not letting this research sit on a shelf. I’ve already sent emails and offered to send the full packet to the people in charge of overseeing our state government, including:
- Senator Tony Bisignano, Ranking Member of the Senate Government Oversight Committee who has been pushing for more accountability.
- The Government Oversight Committees in both the House and Senate (led by people like Senator Kerry Gruenhagen and Representative Holly Brink).
- The Health and Human Services Committees, who are directly responsible for DHHS.
- The Media, including Laura Belin at Bleeding Heartland, to make sure the public knows what’s happening.
What’s Next?
Now that the research is done, I’m working on the very last step: collecting the final signatures needed under Iowa Code § 11. Once I have those, I can hand everything over to State Auditor Rob Sand for a formal, independent investigation.
If you live in Iowa and you want to show your support for this effort, head to Change dot org to sign the online version of the petition!
sign the petition For nearly 30 years, the state has been able to hide these failures behind the guise of protecting children and their privacy, and sealed court records. It’s time to finally bring what’s been done in the dark out to the light so we can actually protect Iowa’s children.
Want to know more?
I know you are eager to know more…. My research and the Audit Petition Packet focuses on Eight Domains and Thirteen Failure Categories.
Audit Snapshot (Attachment 3)
The focus area, key documents, and observed patterns for each of the 8 domains from
Table 1: Audit Snapshot [A3] Audit Petition Packet v1.9 (4/16/2026) The Systemic Failure Matrix (Attachment 28)
The columns represent the 39 attachments and each of the rows is one of the 13 failure categories I focused on.
Table 33: Systemic Failure Matrix [A28] Audit Petition Packet v1.9 (4/16/2026) And some more of those disturbing statistics:
Safety and Fatality Indicators
- Extreme Starvation Metrics: In two of Iowa’s most high-profile fatalities, teenagers were found at weights far below normal: Natalie Finn weighed 66 lbs at death, and Sabrina Ray weighed only 56 lbs.
- Mass Rejection of Abuse Reports: In SFY24 alone, the agency rejected 20,891 abuse reports involving children ages 0–5; notably, 5,824 of those rejected reports involved infants and toddlers.
- Maltreatment Recurrence: Iowa’s maltreatment recurrence rate (the rate of children abused again within 12 months) is 19.1%, which is double the national target of 9.7%.
- Foster Care Abuse Rate: Children in Iowa foster care are maltreated at a rate of 42.61 per 100,000 days, which is 4.7 times higher than the national target of 9.07.
Workforce and Operational Collapse
- Staffing Depletion: Between federal review rounds, the agency documented a loss of 638 staff members.
- Extreme Caseloads: Caseworker caseloads have been documented as high as 35–40 cases per worker, while the agency recently reported a 13% decline in case managers alongside a 19% increase in caseloads since 2016.
- Supervisory “Time Poverty”: Supervisors in the field spend 50% of their time on documentation and paperwork rather than coaching staff or reviewing case safety.
- Recruitment Delays: It takes an average of 72 days to fill critical child protection vacancies, far exceeding the agency’s own target of 50 days.
Fiscal Negligence and Federal Non-Compliance
- Unallowable Claims: A technical analysis found that Iowa claimed $40 million in federal funds for “Solution Based Casework” (SBC) that was not actually eligible for Title IV-E reimbursement.
- Uncollected Revenue: State auditors found the agency failed to collect $3.2 million in nursing facility penalties, representing a “statutory defiance” of the law.
- Questioned Federal Costs: A single special investigation into a behavioral health contractor identified $167,716 in questioned costs across IPN, SOR, and ARPA federal grants.
- Historical Payment Errors: For over a decade, state audits have found a 19% error rate in cases where families were receiving both foster care and Family Investment Program (FIP) payments simultaneously.
Systemic Service and Capacity Gaps
- Collapse of Child Care Infrastructure: Over the last decade, Iowa has seen a 56% decline in child care programs and a 6% decline in total child care spaces.
- Under-Capacity Due to Staffing: Roughly 57% of licensed child care centers are operating below their licensed capacity specifically because they cannot find enough staff to meet required ratios.
- SafeCare Performance Failure: In a recent reporting period, 0% of contractors met the performance benchmarks for the SafeCare program.
- Substance Abuse Removal Surge: Between 2014 and 2018, removals of children due to parental substance abuse increased by 47% (from 1,424 to 2,093).
Data Integrity and Oversight Void
- Inaccessible Records: Despite having a massive budget, the agency admitted that basic workforce qualification data is “not readily available” and requires a manual review of physical personnel files.
- Unlinked Child Records: An independent analysis of the KinderTrack database found 286 unlinked parent-child records, making it impossible to perform accurate safety or fiscal analysis.
- Ombudsman Workload Explosion: The Iowa Ombudsman’s office opened 6,266 cases in FY2025, representing a 57% increase since 2014
I am eager to see what our state legislature has to say about all this. A press release has also been sent out to a couple local papers. And I will not be quiet until something is done to correct these horrible injustices!
I will keep you posted!!
✌️💖🌈🦄 Ashley Marie Meredith, MSN
Petition Organizer
P.S. I am sure this will piss off all of the right people… and for the record, I will NEVER unalive myself!!
Momma loves you Alexys, Noah (Nashville) and Eli (Elliot)!!
I miss you EVERY DAY!!
I will NEVER stop fighting for my boys to come home
where they belong!!
References
SECTION 7 — Supporting Evidence & Attachments
PART 1 — Jurisdiction & Authority
- Attachment 1 — Statutory Authority (Iowa Code § 11.6, § 11.24)
PART 2 — Federal Oversight Failure
PART 3 — Current Admissions by the State
PART 4 — Independent Systems Evaluations
PART 5 — Auditor Findings
PART 6 — Oversight Breakdown
PART 7 — Risk & Harm Conditions
- Attachment 27 — Fatality Risk Analysis
- Attachment 28 — Failure Matrix
PART 8 — Failure Outcomes
PART 9 — Public Impact & Contradictions
PART 10 — Case-Level Audit Trigger
- Attachment 35 — Affidavit – Ashley Marie Meredith RE: communications with Washington County Attorney Nathan Repp
- Attachment 36 — Affidavit – Ashley Marie Meredith RE: Procedural History & Exhaustion of Reporting Channels
PART 11 — Public Interest
PART 12 — Open Records
- Attachment 38 Open Records Requests
38A- 26-927
38B- 26-1536
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