Depending on children's level of risk, social workers may visit as often as twice a week to ensure that medical and schooling needs are met.

Providers in the SCOH program must alert DHS when a client family has a problem and are required to file quarterly progress reports.

Germantown Settlement, which received $462,361 from DHS for at-home services in 2006, is one of the five providers the city suspended after The Inquirer's stories raised questions about contractor oversight.

In a December 2006 review, DHS said Germantown Settlement appeared to "provide minimal social services to families." It often failed to visit the children in its care and had two employees, including a supervisor, who worked full-time jobs for two different SCOH providers at the same time.

In one case, a child with severe tooth decay and other medical problems had not seen a physician in two years. In another case, a teen did not appear to have attended school in two years.

One Germantown Settlement social worker said he tried to visit clients but they weren't available.

Inspectors were skeptical. "It seems unlikely that this situation could happen with such frequency," reviewers wrote.

In three instances where cases were closed, DHS was never notified. One case file contained only two documents. In all, workers at Germantown documented only 70 of 174 required visits during the review period.

According to the review, Emma Cummings-Freeman, vice president of Germantown Settlement, told inspectors that "a ceiling collapsed in the building where the files are housed and files were destroyed because of water damage." When asked - twice - to document the floods, it was not clear in the reviewer's notes that she was able to do so. She said "there were missing documents in other files and that 'damaged' case records might not have been recreated."

Cummings-Freeman declined repeated requests from The Inquirer for interviews.

"The story is what the story is. I can't elaborate," she said yesterday.

In December, when a DHS reviewer asked her about one of the workers who had two full-time jobs, Cummings-Freeman said she had been satisfied with the worker's performance. She was shocked, she said, by the revelation that he was not visiting his families with any regularity or completing required documentation.

Germantown Settlement's glaring failings should not have come as news. In three of the last five evaluations DHS program evaluators gave the company its lowest rating, "problematic." Although Germantown improved at times to "average," it later regressed.

In December 2002, Germantown Settlement failed to meet 21 of the 27 standards DHS had set. Even after submitting a correction plan, the provider made no progress.

"The Germantown Settlement SCOH program is fraught with problems," analyst Valerie C. Mack wrote. "Each subsequent evaluation finds the program performing more poorly than the last."

In February 2003, when DHS sought to suspend new cases for Germantown Settlement, the company's executive director challenged the suggestion, "claiming he had no knowledge of his agency's ongoing problems," the report said.

The reviewer said it appeared Germantown Settlement had no will to improve its SCOH program. "Intake should be closed until the agency demonstrates significant improvement."

A reviewer wrote in 2004 that the provider had "historically demonstrated an inability to provide adequate SCOH services to families."

In a March 2007 review, Germantown met just 54 percent of performance standards.