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1 SENATE/HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
2 THE 21ST LEGISLATURE
3 INTERIM OF 2001
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7 JOINT SENATE-HOUSE INVESTIGATIVE COMMITTEE HEARING
8 OCTOBER 27, 2001
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12 Taken at the State Capitol, 415 South Beretania,
13 Conference Room 325, Honolulu, Hawaii, commencing at
14 9:09 a.m. on Saturday, October 27, 2001.
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19 BEFORE: JESSICA R. PERRY, CSR No. 404
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1 APPEARANCES:
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3 Senate-House Investigative Committee:
4 Co-Chair Senator Colleen Hanabusa
5 Co-Chair Representative Scott Saiki
6 Vice-Chair Senator Russell Kokubun
7 Vice-Chair Representative Blake Oshiro
8 Senator Jan Yagi Buen
9 Representative Ken Ito
10 Representative Bertha Kawakami
11 Representative Bertha Leong
12 Representative Barbara Marumoto
13 Senator Norman Sakamoto
14 Senator Sam Slom
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17 Also Present:
18 Special Counsel James Kawashima
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1 I N D E X
2 WITNESS: DR. JOHN DONKERVOET
3 EXAMINATION BY: PAGE
4 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA.............. 6
5 VICE-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE OSHIRO....... 61
6 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN............. 67
7 REPRESENTATIVE ITO..................... 73
8 SENATOR BUEN........................... 76
9 REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI................ 80
10 SENATOR SAKAMOTO....................... 86
11 REPRESENTATIVE LEONG................... 91
12 REPRESENTATIVE MARUMOTO................ 94
13 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA.............. 98
14 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI.......... 106
15 SENATOR SAKAMOTO....................... 110
16 SENATOR BUEN........................... 111
17 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA.............. 113
18 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI.......... 115
19 WITNESS: MR. EDWIN KOYAMA
20 EXAMINATION BY:
21 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA.............. 119
22 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN............. 161
23 REPRESENTATIVE ITO..................... 163
24 SENATOR SLOM........................... 166
25 REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI................ 170
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1 I N D E X, (Continued)
2 SENATOR SAKAMOTO....................... 173
3 REPRESENTATIVE LEONG................... 177
4 REPRESENTATIVE MARUMOTO................ 179
5 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA.............. 182
6 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI.......... 190
7 SENATOR SAKAMOTO....................... 193
8 REPRESENTATIVE ITO..................... 197
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1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Good morning.
3 We'd like to convene our joint investigative committee to
4 investigate the state's efforts to comply with the Felix
5 consent decree. We'll begin with a roll call.
6 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Co-Chair Saiki?
7 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Present.
8 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Vice-Chair
9 Kokubun?
10 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN: Here.
11 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Vice-Chair Oshiro?
12 VICE-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE OSHIRO: Here.
13 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Senator Buen?
14 SENATOR BUEN: Here.
15 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
16 Ito?
17 REPRESENTATIVE ITO: Here.
18 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
19 Kawakami?
20 REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI: Here.
21 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
22 Leong?
23 REPRESENTATIVE LEONG: Present.
24 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
25 Marumoto?
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1 REPRESENTATIVE MARUMOTO: Here.
2 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Senator Matsuura
3 is excused. Senator Sakamoto?
4 SENATOR SAKAMOTO: Here.
5 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Senator Slom?
6 SENATOR SLOM: Here.
7 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: We have quorum.
8 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
9 Members, our first witness this morning is Mr. John
10 Donkervoet. Members, as you know, Mr. Donkervoet was
11 scheduled to appear last Saturday, but due to time
12 limitations he agreed to appear this morning and to waive the
13 ten-day notice requirement.
14 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Good morning.
15 Mr. Donkervoet, do you solemnly swear or affirm that the
16 testimony you're about to give will be the truth, the whole
17 truth, and nothing but the truth?
18 MR. DONKERVOET: I do.
19 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Thank you.
20 Members, we'll follow our usual protocol. We'll begin with
21 Mr. Kawashima.
22 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA: Thank you, Madam
23 Chair.
24 EXAMINATION
25 BY SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA:
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1 Q. Please state your name and business address.
2 A. My name is John Cornelius Donkervoet and I don't
3 have a business address, so my home address is 1479
4 Akeakamai, A-K-E-A-K-A-M-A-I, Street in Honolulu, 96816.
5 Q. Thank you. Mr. Donkervoet, will you please give us
6 your educational background after secondary school.
7 A. Sure. I went to Trinity College in Hartford,
8 Connecticut for my undergraduate degree and then got my
9 master's degree four years -- six years after that at the
10 University of Rhode Island where I also graduated with a
11 Ph.D. I did my internship at the Medical University of South
12 Carolina.
13 Q. All right. So the actual Ph.D. was obtained at the
14 University of Rhode Island, not at the Medical University of
15 South Carolina?
16 A. That's correct.
17 Q. Now, when did you come to Hawaii, sir?
18 A. I came to Hawaii in 1996, in July.
19 Q. And for what reason did you come here?
20 A. I was recruited by the Department of Health, and at
21 the time Dr. Richard Munger, who was chief of the Child and
22 Adolescent Mental Health Division, to be the clinical
23 director.
24 Q. And I understand when you came your wife Tina
25 Donkervoet also came with you?
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1 A. That's correct. She was recruited for a position
2 in the utilization review, I think, department. It might be
3 quality assurance or quality management.
4 Q. DOH, though?
5 A. That's correct, and child and adolescent.
6 Q. Now, have you -- strike that.
7 Am I to understand, then, since July of 1996 you
8 were employed as the clinical director for CAMHD?
9 A. No, that's incorrect.
10 Q. What's correct?
11 A. I was clinical director for a year over at CAMHD,
12 and at the end of that year some of you may remember that
13 Dr. Munger and division had shifted from a direct service
14 provision model, which is to say the family guidance centers
15 were providing most mental health services, to a
16 fee-for-service model, which is a change over to the family
17 guidance centers basically serving as care coordinators and
18 authorization services and helping manage those services and
19 then private provider agencies became involved in the direct
20 provision. And in 1997, at the end of putting that together,
21 in which my wife was actively involved, I decided that, first
22 off, it was working a little bit closely with her, and
23 secondly, it's not the kind of mental health that I'm
24 particularly interested in. I'm more interested in direct
25 care provision.
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1 So I moved over to the Department of Education and
2 spent two years running what's called the Felix Staff Service
3 Development Institute, which was in short kind of a
4 mini-agency that was co-funded by both the Department of
5 Health and the Department of Education to help train direct
6 care practitioners, special ed teachers, therapeutic aides,
7 anyone who was directly involved in working with Felix class
8 children. That work continued on for about two years, and I
9 think the job for a consolidated institute, which was, you
10 know, a joint effort by DOE and DOH, had kind of come to a
11 conclusion, and so as they were shifting those resources back
12 into their respective agencies, I made a shift over to adult
13 mental health for a brief period of time where I worked
14 primarily at Hawaii State Hospital doing utilization review,
15 patient assessments, that type of work. And then I believe
16 in about January the state started --
17 Q. What year, sir?
18 A. January of 2000, I believe.
19 Q. All right.
20 A. The state began the initiative to bring
21 multi-systemic therapy, which is an intensive in-home
22 approach to working with conduct disorder kids primarily and
23 substance abusing kids, into the state. I had been
24 affiliated with MST, having worked for Scott Henggeler
25 previously, and so I thought that it would be a nice fit in
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1 terms of my skills, since I already had some expertise in the
2 area, interviewed for the position of sort of the state
3 coordinator for MST, and that led to the development of the
4 MST continuum of care about six, eight months later. So I
5 shifted from that position of being coordinator of the
6 home-based MST to being the clinical supervisor for the MST
7 continuum of care.
8 Q. I saw somewhere that you became the MST coordinator
9 in July -- on July 1, 2000, which one was that, then?
10 A. Actually, I was still working at Hawaii State
11 Hospital from -- I took a couple of months off and then up
12 until January of that year I was working at Hawaii State
13 Hospital and trying to spend part of that time helping MST to
14 get up, putting the RFPs together, helping coordinate the RFP
15 process for the MST home-based, so I don't think it was
16 actually my title at the time, and most of my work was spent
17 doing utilization review for adult mental health.
18 Q. So when actually did you shift over to do primarily
19 MST?
20 A. That would be January of 2000.
21 Q. We're getting a little ahead of ourselves, but you
22 resigned from DOH very recently, did you not?
23 A. Yes, I did.
24 Q. And on what date did you resign, sir?
25 A. Geez. I think it was October 3rd.
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1 Q. And what was the reason for your resignation?
2 A. I had a lot of reasons for my resignation. I think
3 primarily amongst them was it had become really clear to
4 me -- I fervently believe in what's happening in the state of
5 Hawaii for Felix class children. My understanding of the
6 consent decree is a little bit different than many people's
7 understanding of the consent decree, and I think if you
8 listen to what's happening nationally in children's mental
9 health and in special education for kids with mental health
10 needs, we have done here a superlative job, far beyond what
11 other states have been able to put into place, and we're also
12 talking about a group of children who have been denied their
13 civil rights in this state for approximately 20, 25 years,
14 and so to turn that around in that short period of time I
15 think is a phenomenal effort on the part of the people who
16 have been working in that.
17 I also believe that my presence at the time as the
18 continuum was sort of being -- shutting down, I guess, for
19 lack of a better word, I really began to feel that I was
20 posing a very convenient target to cast some, I think,
21 misrepresentations about the way that services were being
22 provided, about the way that the work of division was going
23 on, and I felt rather than continue to provide that
24 convenient target for many people, I made the decision to
25 step aside, and to do so more rapidly than I had originally
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1 intended.
2 Secondly, I have been working here in this state
3 for five years, and it's been an inordinate amount of hard
4 work. It's been -- it's required a number -- I don't want to
5 sound like I'm whining, but it's required a number of
6 sacrifices on the part of myself and my family. Case in
7 point, I missed one of my son's baseball games last week by
8 being here and I'm missing a basketball game by being here
9 this morning. Now, I know that that may not seem like it's a
10 lot to the members of this committee who may also be missing
11 things, but those are things that I value and those are
12 things that my wife values and those are things that my kids
13 value, and I kind of came to the conclusion that maybe enough
14 was enough, that -- you know, Tina's work takes a lot of her
15 time. My work was taking a lot of our time, and we have
16 other work that is also equally important to us, so I decided
17 to focus on that.
18 Thirdly, I will say although I have not seen
19 Margaret Pereira's testimony myself, friends of mine told me
20 some of the things that she had said up here, and some people
21 said that it was not as bad as it sounded. It wasn't sort of
22 a personal indictment on me. Some people suggested that some
23 of the questions were kind of leading in a way to seem like I
24 was being blamed for things that maybe had or had not
25 happened, but nonetheless, I considered and still consider
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1 Margaret a friend of mine, and I felt that we had an
2 extraordinarily close working relationship. And many times I
3 looked to her to provide some authority, because she was in a
4 position of respect on the Windward side for the Windward
5 team over there to help out with some staff difficulties that
6 we were having, and I really strongly objected to, I think,
7 the provision of a forum that really didn't lead her to
8 feeling like she could be comfortable talking with me
9 directly about things that had been going on that she was
10 upset with.
11 And I guess my objection was strong enough, my
12 feeling that I was tired enough, and my sense that the job
13 was important enough that I need not be in the way kind of
14 added up to me feeling like enough already, I need to move on
15 and do something else and let the job finish itself out.
16 Q. All right. Thank you. You are unemployed at the
17 present time?
18 A. Actually, I'm underemployed. I teach one graduate
19 class at the University of Hawaii in child assessment and
20 treatment for the graduate students in the clinical
21 psychology program.
22 Q. Do you have any other consultant positions or
23 anything like that or intent to have such in the near future?
24 A. No, but if I could find one of those $500 an hour
25 psychologist positions that Kaniu mentioned last week I would
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1 like one of those.
2 Q. Let me go back and clarify a few things before I
3 get back to your reasons for your resignation. You were the
4 director, then, of the Felix Staff Development and Training
5 Institute, I think they called it?
6 A. It's Felix Staff and Service Development Institute,
7 yeah. Yeah, I was.
8 Q. So when you came back to be the MST coordinator,
9 and as you say that was about January of 2000, was it because
10 the development and training institute was closing down?
11 A. No, no. The training institute had closed down
12 before the MST initiative had been sort of put on the radar
13 screen per se. I left the training institute because,
14 frankly, the Department of Education was not going to renew
15 my contract, and the reason for that was they -- both the
16 Department of Education and the Department of Health had
17 ponied up an equal amount of dollars in order to fund the
18 training institute, and those were in the form of monies to
19 be spent on training endeavors, office equipment, and also in
20 addition to that some positions were allotted from each side
21 of the fence, so to speak, from CAMHD and the Department of
22 Education, and both agencies came to the conclusion, and I
23 was part of those discussions and in many ways in agreement,
24 that the time of having a separate existing entity to get
25 training out there to build up baseline skills had sort of
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1 come to a close. And so what they decided to do was to pull
2 those monies back and to pull the training initiatives back
3 into their respective division and in the department of
4 special education.
5 Q. So they are still doing the training, it's just
6 that they are doing it in house in their respective
7 departments?
8 A. There's still a lot of training going on, yes.
9 Q. Now, you mentioned earlier the Medical University
10 of South Carolina. You said you did an internship there?
11 A. Yeah, I did my internship at the Medical University
12 of South Carolina, and I chose specifically to do that
13 because it's -- like my graduate training, I started out as a
14 generalist, which -- so I had equal training in adult
15 problems and in children's mental health challenges,
16 emotional impairment, what have you, and at the Medical
17 University of South Carolina they have a combination of a
18 research base and then four separate different rotations that
19 one can do. In my rotations I spent two at the Veteran's
20 Administration Hospital in Charleston doing neuropsychology
21 and substance abuse treatment and then two on children's
22 rotation, one was at the crime victim's center in Charleston
23 and then the other was on the inpatient unit where I also
24 worked with very young preschoolers at a place called Project
25 Impact. So my affiliation with Henggeler, which I think is
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1 where you're getting at, there is a rotation at the medical
2 university for MST. I was not involved with that until after
3 my internship when I took a part-time position as one of the
4 trainers working with MST, which is where our affiliation
5 kind of began.
6 Q. And for what period of time did you do that type of
7 work?
8 A. I was there for half time for approximately a year,
9 and I was getting my own private practice going. And then I
10 continued on in 80 percent capacity for the second year, and
11 at the end of the second year they were moving to develop
12 what's called MST Services Incorporated, which was a distal
13 business from the Medical University of South Carolina where
14 they could go about doing national training on MST themselves
15 without having to deal with the bureaucracy of the medical
16 university. I was offered a position there to do nation-wide
17 training, and it was at -- it was coincidental with that that
18 Dr. Munger called me, because when he had come over to
19 Hawaii -- we had also worked together at MUSC. When he came
20 over to Hawaii, I jokingly said, if you ever have need for a
21 psychologist, you know, give me a call, and he did. And
22 after talking about it for a long time with my spouse and
23 with Dr. Munger and with other people -- other members of my
24 family, of course, came to the conclusion that at the age
25 of -- I guess I was 34 at the time and we could be locked
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1 into our 30-year mortgage and never experience another piece
2 of the world or we could do a little bit of exploration, and
3 so we decided that that's what we wanted to do.
4 Q. All right. Now, let me get back to the testimony
5 you gave about the several reasons why you decided to resign.
6 Now, you testified that one of the reasons -- the one you
7 enumerated first was, and I'm paraphrasing, that you became a
8 convenient target?
9 A. Yeah.
10 Q. And convenient target for whom, sir?
11 A. Well, you know, I really kind of believe that some
12 of the things that I was -- first off, there was an article
13 in the Honolulu Weekly about, you know, the Felix endeavors,
14 and there was some suggestion in the article that -- which I
15 took as -- as relatively amusing, but, you know, in some ways
16 it kind of made me sound like I was a complete monkey and
17 that if it were not for my wife being, you know, the chief of
18 Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division I would be down
19 at IHS sitting waiting for my next meal, and I'm not -- I
20 understand how that perception can occur, but, you know, I
21 also pride myself on being an okay clinician, being able to
22 do an honest day's work, and being able to supervise people
23 pretty effectively.
24 And I think that, you know, the overtone that began
25 to get back to me -- and again, I didn't see the testimony,
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1 so I'm speaking second and third hand, and I really was
2 surprised that some of the things that people were saying had
3 been said in this room, but it really made it sound like I
4 had done things that were either corrupt or were ridden with
5 conflict or that were dishonest and that, in my mind, simply
6 is not true.
7 In addition to that, it felt like there were a lot
8 of people that were looking at the continuum -- that we're
9 looking at MST as a whole in this state and basically using
10 that to sort of besmirch all of the terrific work that has
11 gone on at division and at the family guidance centers, and
12 it's really clear to me -- it's really clear to me the
13 primary reason that the continuum shut down is because we
14 aren't going to be able to get enough kids into the study,
15 and the reason we can't get enough kids into the study is
16 nothing more or less than the family guidance centers are
17 doing such a terrific job with these high end, extremely
18 challenging, very difficult kids.
19 And that's not to say that the continuum is not a
20 great idea and that's not to say that the one that they have
21 started up in Philadelphia isn't going to prove to be one of
22 the best things in children's mental health since talk
23 therapy, but it is to say that we were now losing our target
24 population because the practice in the field at large has
25 come forward in such amazing leaps and bounds, and that's in
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1 a relatively short period of time, and I think because of the
2 nasty things that people were saying about myself, the
3 continuum, and MST being in the state that it is really
4 unfair to look at those words and to form an opinion about a
5 mental health system that actually is functioning
6 unbelievably well.
7 Q. You are --
8 A. Did I answer that?
9 Q. I had asked you, sir -- I'm sorry?
10 A. Did that answer that? In a windy way, yeah.
11 Q. I was asking you questions about the first reason,
12 which was that you had become a convenient target. I think,
13 though, you incorporated into your answer references to
14 Margaret Pereira and what was said --
15 A. Which was the third reason, yeah.
16 Q. And maybe let me ask you a few questions there
17 while we are at it. From what I heard you testify, you have
18 great respect for Margaret Pereira?
19 A. I like her an awful lot. I do not like if what
20 I've heard is true that she said here, but I liked her as an
21 individual and I think she brought a number of skills to the
22 team that were valuable.
23 Q. And you considered her to be a person who is
24 honest, did you not?
25 A. There were a number of times that Margaret required
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1 counseling by either myself or the lead psychiatrist on the
2 team for interpersonal difficulties and issues around race,
3 so there is a weakness there that I think would compromise my
4 ability to say yes, she's a really honest person. There were
5 times that she was -- that she would say things to people and
6 then deny that she had said them later.
7 Q. Now, in your case, though, obviously you made a
8 subjective judgmental opinion or conclusion that she didn't
9 say those things, right?
10 A. No, not in the cases that I'm just referring to.
11 In times that we were talking, there were a number of
12 situations on the team where people would become -- have
13 problems with other members of the team, and frequently what
14 would happen is clicks would kind of form and frequently I
15 had to speak with Margaret to help her see her way clearly,
16 to not targeting a weakened individual on the team, to not
17 spread gossip or talk stink behind people's backs, and to use
18 the skills that she had.
19 I actually told her, you know, you have a tendency
20 on the Windward team to sort of start this vulturing kind of
21 effect and that frequently when people are looking a little
22 weaker than other members of the team, you start to kind of
23 go after them a little bit, and she and I talked and she
24 recognized that that was a pattern of behavior for her and we
25 would talk and I would ask her -- I said, people look up to
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1 you, they respect you, they come to you and ask for your
2 wisdom and would it be at all possible for you to curtail
3 some of that behavior and try to bring everybody into the
4 fold.
5 So on the one hand, although I had real respect for
6 some of the things and the leadership qualities that she had,
7 on the other hand, it became a situation where very
8 frequently I had to intervene and provide some intervention
9 and direction in order for her to be more effective in
10 utilizing those skills.
11 Q. And you suggested that there were occasions where
12 you can confirm that she said something that she denied
13 saying?
14 A. That's correct.
15 Q. And you testified, though, sir, that what happened
16 here, what she testified to, bothered you, although you
17 haven't read the transcript?
18 A. And I hadn't heard it.
19 Q. And you haven't watched the television account?
20 A. Right.
21 Q. So you don't know exactly what was said, yes?
22 A. That would be correct.
23 Q. And obviously you have chosen not to find out what
24 she said by perhaps watching the video or however it might
25 be?
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1 A. I've asked for the transcripts, but I've decided --
2 I've also -- you know, to be honest with you, I wanted to
3 call her and say, you know, I don't know what you said, but
4 what's the deal? And I didn't want to sully the water or
5 muddy things up in that way. I don't want to, you know, bend
6 what I have to say as my perception of the way that things
7 are to be affected. However, they are tainted by what I've
8 heard other people have said has gone on in this room.
9 Q. These reasons -- these three reasons, it may not be
10 possible for you to do and just tell me if that is the case,
11 but are they like equally -- bear equal weight in your mind
12 or are some more important than others?
13 A. I think some had been going on for a long --
14 Q. I'm talking about the three.
15 A. I know. I'm with you on that. And a number of
16 these things, you know, had weighed on my mind for a
17 considerable period of time. I mean, it's really hard
18 working as closely as I do with my wife. It's a tiny field.
19 It's a tiny state. She's extremely talented and I can do an
20 okay job. And it's really hard, because she touches
21 everything in children's mental health, to sort of figure
22 out, well, now how am I going to use those skills that I've
23 spent the last ten years acquiring, but -- and that has
24 always posed its challenges.
25 I mean, people always look at, well, the only
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1 reason that -- you know, when I first got here the only
2 reason that she had a job was because I had been brought over
3 for clinical director, and then the only that I got the
4 training institute job was because she was going to become
5 clinical director of division, and then the only reason that
6 we brought MST into the state was because, you know, I'm
7 Tina's husband and I had previously worked for Henggeler. I
8 mean, there's no escaping it. There's no escaping it. That
9 had been going on since the day that we arrived here.
10 Some of the other things became more heavy, I
11 guess, heavier, as time went on, the negativity of the
12 environment. The challenges to my family has never changed,
13 you know, and there have been -- when I first moved to adult
14 mental health, one of the things I really liked about it was
15 it really was a 7:45 to 4:30 kind of job. You know, I could
16 drop them off at school and I could pick them up at school
17 and I didn't have to negotiate with Tina. You know, it was
18 great. So that's been an ongoing burden.
19 You know, Margaret's testimony, of course, was a
20 very sudden thing and really took me so much by surprise,
21 again, not knowing what she said. I feel like a dope, but,
22 you know, I have to say that that came as -- that came as a
23 shock that things had eroded within my team to the point
24 where somebody felt that they needed to come forward, you
25 know, kicking in a door like Mike Wallace and cast a light on
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1 something that I did not think was that bad. I didn't think
2 it was bad at all. I thought it was pretty good.
3 Q. By the way, are there now four reasons, then?
4 A. I don't know. Did I come up with a fourth?
5 Q. Working under the -- the number of your wife?
6 A. That, no. The number of my wife, I think, was my
7 providing a convenient target and the sacrifice it's taken to
8 the family is kind of combined.
9 Q. I see. Now, getting back to this issue of what
10 Margaret may have said. As you say, you don't know exactly
11 what she said. You've heard rumors. You've heard second,
12 third hand what might have been said, what might have been
13 testified to, but based upon what I, then, understand your
14 assessment to be of her and her integrity and honesty, I'm
15 not sure why that bothered you such that you would list that
16 as a reason why you would resign.
17 A. I do.
18 Q. All right. Now, getting back to the first one, the
19 convenient target issue. Convenient target for -- who was
20 taking shots at you is what I'm asking?
21 A. You know, it's come from all sides. It's come from
22 all sides. There have been times that -- I mean, the Robert
23 Rees article, clearly, despite the name that the -- despite
24 the fact that the name has been mispronounced, it's come up
25 in this room an awful number of times. It's also been -- I
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1 mean, advocates have found fault. The Department of
2 Education has cast some skepticism, but I would also say that
3 by and large those are much broader kinds of pot shots that,
4 you know, in the individual working relationship if people
5 object to something, they object to it because, you know, of
6 something that is not going their way or that we're having
7 difficulty hashing out, but in the broader -- in the broader
8 scheme I think it's more a matter of casting aspersions on
9 what has happened with regards to the, you know, increase in
10 costs or whatever problem that they have. It just -- it
11 makes it very convenient to sort of look at a couple that is
12 working closely together.
13 Q. Mr. Donkervoet, the article you're talking about
14 Mr. Rees wrote was in the Honolulu Weekly publication?
15 A. Yeah.
16 Q. And I understand, though, that that article was
17 written with your approval, was it not? Well, let me restate
18 that. Maybe that's not exactly correct. The reporter asked
19 to interview you and you agreed to be interview?
20 A. No, I wasn't interviewed.
21 Q. What happened?
22 A. I was never asked to be interviewed.
23 Q. How did he get that information, then?
24 A. I would imagine from speaking with my wife or to
25 other people, but he didn't speak to me.
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1 Q. Oh, I see. You never talked to Mr. Rees?
2 A. No. Seen him on TV, but never spoken to him.
3 Q. I'm sorry. I didn't realize that. I thought you
4 had actually given him an interview.
5 A. No.
6 Q. Your wife did, though?
7 A. Yes, she did.
8 Q. And the information -- well, there may be questions
9 about the accuracy of the information in the article, but am
10 I to understand, then, much of the information from that
11 article was obtained from Christina Donkervoet?
12 A. I didn't interview for the article. I didn't write
13 the article. Didn't edit the article. I don't know where he
14 got the information.
15 Q. You read the article?
16 A. I read the article, but I didn't ask Tina to
17 highlight the points -- the parts that she had come up with
18 or that he had just written.
19 Q. Did she suggest that the reporter did not report
20 the interview and information accurately?
21 A. We both discussed it was clearly slanted.
22 Q. Again, that was part of the reason why you
23 resigned, things of that nature?
24 A. Yeah, sort of the pot shot kind of thing.
25 Q. Now, the MST program, let's move to that, sir.
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1 A. Okay.
2 Q. You already testified that the person who developed
3 it was Scott Henggeler?
4 A. Uh-huh.
5 Q. How do you pronounce his last name?
6 A. Henggeler.
7 Q. Henggeler, all right. And you interned under -- is
8 it Dr. Henggeler?
9 A. No, I did not.
10 Q. You did not intern? How did you become -- excuse
11 me. You worked for Dr. Henggeler for half time for a year
12 and then 80 percent for the second year?
13 A. That's correct.
14 Q. Working directly with MST?
15 A. Working directly in the development of the -- they
16 had already done a lot of training of MST and supervision of
17 MST teams, and what they were looking for was -- they had
18 gotten a Medicaid grant because Medicaid in the state of
19 Charleston had indicated that every in-home intensive service
20 provider needed to go through the MST training because they
21 were the only intensive in-home service providers that were
22 getting results with conduct disorder kids, sustainable, long
23 lasting resorts -- results, I'm sorry, and so what I was
24 hired on to do was to, A, do some training within the state
25 of Charleston and B, to help redesign the training materials
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1 so that they were more cohesive and user friendly. And I had
2 taken a practicum, which is unusual in graduate school, on
3 workshop development, implementation, and evaluation and
4 hence was a pretty good fit with the job.
5 Q. Was your wife also involved with Dr. Henggeler or
6 Mr. Henggeler?
7 A. My wife at the time worked at the same hospital.
8 She worked at what's called the Institute of Psychiatry at
9 the Medical University of South Carolina and she was --
10 started out as a utilization review nurse there and then
11 moved to oversee the development of a continuum of care for
12 the entire Institute of Psychiatry. So they were looking to
13 broaden beyond just hospital-based services to be more
14 inclusive of other kinds of outpatient types of services, and
15 as she oversaw that, she was, I think, tangentially involved
16 because her unit was participating in the psychiatric
17 hospitalization study for MST which started in about '95.
18 Q. Mr. Donkervoet, do you know how it was that the
19 Department of Health decided to utilize the MST program for
20 Hawaii?
21 A. Sure. Well, I think I do. I think I do. I really
22 don't think you can take a look at the literature around
23 conduct disorder kids, substance abusing kids -- actually,
24 conduct disorder kids who are also substance abusers, not
25 just for straight substance abusing kids, and real hard core
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1 delinquent kinds of kids, you can't look at the literature
2 that's available and not come to the conclusion that MST
3 really is the best thing that's available. You don't have to
4 take my word for it. It's very clear in the surgeon
5 general's report on children's mental health for the year
6 2000. About 45 lines are devoted to conduct disorder, about
7 22 of those are devoted to the effects of MST. And as a
8 result of, A, a huge population of these kids that are
9 getting serviced through Felix monies, you might as well be
10 using the thing that is most effective in treating these
11 kids.
12 And so, in fact, as part of a movement towards the
13 review and use of empirically supported treatments, these are
14 treatments we can actually say we know work, not just that we
15 think work or not just that anecdotally somebody has had some
16 success somewhere, but that we can actually look to the
17 science and say, hey, here's something that has been tried in
18 a variety of areas with a variety of different kids and it's
19 getting pretty good results, and that's precisely why MST was
20 selected and brought in in the way that it was.
21 Q. Who made the decision, though?
22 A. Oh, geez. I -- my -- I would only be guessing at
23 that, but my guess is that division and department had
24 conversations about how it would be brought in, at what
25 scale, et cetera.
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1 Q. And did you have anything to do with that process?
2 A. I did not.
3 Q. Did your wife?
4 A. I'm certain that she did. She was chief at the
5 time.
6 Q. And when the system -- I'm not sure what the term
7 would be, but when the system was adopted, did the state of
8 Hawaii then have to pay some type of fee to Mr. Henggeler to
9 use the product?
10 A. You know, the fee structure, yes, it's very clear,
11 and here's the way that MST is able to sustain the results
12 that they've gotten in the multiple places. They now have
13 around a hundred teams around the United States servicing,
14 all told, about 5,000 kids, and the way that it's set up is
15 that Henggeler and his group at MST Services -- this is no
16 longer with the medical university, because they set up that
17 sort of subsidiary company of their own. And what they do is
18 they bring out a trainer for a week and they train about 20
19 to 25 people, which is about four to five teams. Each team
20 is comprised of four therapists and one supervisor, and each
21 team will carry at any given time between 16 and 20 children.
22 So it's a very low therapist-child-family ratio, which is one
23 of the reasons that they get the kind of success. You can
24 devote a lot of time very intensively in a very short period
25 of time and make some really good changes in families that
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1 are experiencing a lot of chaos.
2 And what the fee is really about is to, A, start
3 that orienting training and then, B, the secret of MST's
4 success is really to ensure that therapists over the course
5 of time adhere to the model. You've got to really be doing
6 it in order to get outcomes, and there's good data to support
7 that the more that a person actually is doing MST, the better
8 off their families are going to be in the long term. There
9 are not a lot of treatments that can actually say that. We
10 can focus in on what a therapist is doing in the treatment
11 session and how well a family will do after the fact.
12 So in addition to doing the initial training, MST
13 Services also does weekly consultation sessions where they
14 have an expert from MST Services talk a little bit about each
15 one of the cases and figure out where the barriers are to
16 getting progress and what it is that the therapist can do to
17 maybe move a family along. In addition to that, they also
18 provide quarterly booster sessions. So once every three
19 months they come out and they do a couple of days of training
20 on a topic that a team might be struggling with. Lots of
21 these families have dads who are substance abusers or who
22 have marital problems, and these are areas that MST comes
23 out, does some additional training, sort of fine tunes what
24 it is that the teams are working on and how they are working.
25 So all of that is sort of a cost that goes into the ongoing
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1 training and consultation.
2 Q. And is there -- if you know, is there a contract,
3 then, that was entered into by the DOH State of Hawaii and
4 Mr. Henggeler and his company?
5 A. Yeah, there is.
6 Q. The subsidiary company you mentioned in which the
7 program now resides, do you know who owns that company?
8 A. That is owned by Scott Henggeler and his wife,
9 Dr. Melissa Rowland, Keller Struther and his wife, Dr. -- Dr.
10 Melissa Rowland is a child psychiatrist. Keller Struther is
11 the business -- sort of the CEO, I guess, of the company and
12 his wife is Dr. Sonia Schoenwald, who has worked very closely
13 with Scott -- Dr. Henggeler for the last probably 15 years.
14 Q. Now, you mentioned the phrase conduct disorder.
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. What is that, sir?
17 A. Conduct disorder really, to boil it down, it's a
18 disorder in the DSM-IV, which is what psychiatrists and
19 psychologists use to diagnose mental disorders. It's the
20 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and it's in its fourth
21 edition, and conduct disorder is a disorder that can become
22 apparent in children or in adolescents which is marked by
23 what we would consider relatively delinquent kinds of
24 behaviors. By and large we see in these children a lot of
25 status offenses, which is, you know, sort of running away,
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1 being out beyond curfew. In addition to that, we see some
2 more malicious kinds of real property damage, fire setting,
3 bullying kinds of behavior, stealing of cars, drug and
4 alcohol use, physical aggression, lack of respect or regard
5 for authority, and so it really is, you know, if you've seen
6 Rebel Without a Cause, that James Dean kind of youth, run
7 with gangs, frequently in trouble, frequently finding
8 themselves on the bad side of the law, in juvenile justice,
9 family court.
10 Q. Mr. Donkervoet, would it be fair to say that the
11 MST program was developed for juvenile delinquents?
12 A. Yeah, it would be fair to say that the MST
13 program --
14 Q. And that it was tested primarily with male juvenile
15 delinquents?
16 A. No, I don't think that would be fair to say. It
17 has been tested to this point with a variety of juvenile
18 delinquents in a variety -- so far there have been eight
19 published randomized trials, and those trials have included a
20 couple of working -- a couple of works on relatively large
21 scale juvenile offenders, which is to say both males and
22 females, sort of depicting what the population is that they
23 expect, but it has also been and continues to be studied --
24 there's a large National Institute of Drug Abuse grant
25 looking at it in drug court and with substance abusing kids.
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1 It's been tried on youth who have been -- who are
2 at risk of immediate hospitalization, so kids who are
3 suicidal, homicidal, or immediately psychotic and at risk of
4 emergency room admission at that moment. It's also been
5 tried in two studies, one of which has been published, one of
6 which will be published, with juvenile sex offenders. All of
7 these studies have demonstrated across the board a couple of
8 results. One is that family functioning by and large
9 increases when MST is utilized with these kinds of families.
10 The second is that by and large arrests decline by between 25
11 and 75 percent. The third is that by and large school
12 attendance increases. The fourth is that when crimes are
13 committed, the severity of crimes decreases, and the fifth is
14 that when drug use continues, it by and large is of softer
15 drugs.
16 Now, this is done in comparison to a control group,
17 which basically means that two kids can qualify for being in
18 the study, a coin is flipped, and the guy who gets heads goes
19 into MST, the guy who gets tails goes into usual services,
20 juvenile justice or residential treatment, which we try to do
21 here, hospitalization, those kinds of things.
22 Q. Thank you. Now, this program, though, sir, prior
23 to its being utilized here in Hawaii, had it ever been used
24 for children with the same category of special education
25 needs or mental health needs as Felix class children have?
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1 A. Yes, absolutely.
2 Q. Where was that?
3 A. That was done at Charleston. The last large scale
4 NIMH study was a five-year study looking at kids who were at
5 risk for hospitalization for any disorder. So they would be
6 coming to the hospital with severe emotional distress, at
7 risk of suicide, at risk of harming someone else, at risk
8 of -- being unable to take care of themselves because of
9 psychosis, being unmanageable in the community by their
10 parents, so yes.
11 Q. Was that study focused on children with, as you
12 say, severe mental disorders?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. Now, much of the Felix population are not children
15 with severe mental disorders.
16 A. And we're not treating all of the Felix population.
17 We're treating a tiny little subset at the top.
18 Q. How many are you actually treating?
19 A. Well, right now the teams -- there are ten teams
20 around the state that have the capacity to treat, let me see,
21 at any given time 16 a piece, so we have --
22 Q. Are you talking about in-home therapy?
23 A. We're talking about intensive in-home, right, and
24 the continuum is no longer treating anybody. When we shut
25 down, I believe that we had in excess of 35 kids.
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1 Q. You shut down the continuum primarily because you
2 didn't have enough children to really --
3 A. To make the comparison that we really -- to make a
4 meaningful comparison. That's absolutely right.
5 Q. So how many, then, children are you servicing in
6 this category that you described?
7 A. I would not have that number offhand. It may be in
8 the materials that were delivered last week by the Department
9 of Health, but I would -- I would be reluctant to hazard a
10 guess. I could get that information for you, but not being
11 an employee of the Department of Health, it won't be easy.
12 Q. Now, the continuum, though, my understanding is
13 that the continuum was essentially a research-based project?
14 A. Absolutely.
15 Q. And I understand also that the Department of Health
16 asked the legislature for an emergency appropriation of about
17 $1.2 million specifically for MST during that 2000
18 legislative session; do you remember that?
19 A. I don't generally track that all that carefully.
20 Q. You don't -- you aren't aware of any such emergency
21 request?
22 A. I do not know of that. What I'm saying is I never
23 have any knowledge of that. That's not my kuleana.
24 Q. As the coordinator you would not get involved in
25 that?
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1 A. As clinical director I would not get involved in
2 that.
3 Q. I see. Are you aware that the people who made the
4 request for the appropriation indicated that MST was an
5 essential service that was needed to comply with the terms of
6 the Felix consent decree?
7 A. Well, at the time -- at the time there was a
8 benchmark about the continuum and the need to have 56 kids
9 within a certain amount of time involved in the continuum.
10 56 kids in the comparison group and 56 kids that were
11 actually in the continuum. So, you know, I'm also not a
12 lawyer, so I'm reluctant to say, but at the time there was a
13 benchmark about the continuum, and I would think that if the
14 federal court is expecting it to happen, there you have it.
15 That's what I would think.
16 Q. Well, at least part of that appropriation, though,
17 sir, would have been for an experimental service, would it
18 not?
19 A. At least part of --
20 Q. The research-based project.
21 A. I don't have an answer for that. I don't know what
22 the appropriation was for and I'm remiss to answer a question
23 under oath.
24 Q. All right. But at least part of the MST program,
25 though, was a research-based project, an experimental
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1 project?
2 A. You're confusing things. MST home-based is a
3 service that is provided to Felix class kids. It's not a
4 program. It's not a project. It's a service. There are ten
5 teams around --
6 Q. I'm talking about the continuum. You understand
7 that?
8 A. And I'm trying to help clarify for you, because
9 it's striking me that we're mixing apples and oranges. And
10 that service is provided as part of the array of services
11 that are available to Felix class kids under the system of
12 care that is available to them in Hawaii, the system of care
13 being what's mandated within the consent decree. The
14 continuum was an opportunity to examine whether we could have
15 a clinically effective and cost effective approach to keeping
16 really ill children in their communities and still get good
17 outcomes, and we had an opportunity here, because of the way
18 that the system developed, to be part of national research.
19 We had an opportunity here because they were invested in our
20 state, to the extent of having ten teams, to do something
21 that had not been done before. That part was a project, and
22 it was a research-based project, the appropriation for which
23 I do not have any information to offer.
24 Q. An experimental project?
25 A. It was a research study. You're absolutely right.
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1 Q. So therefore, the state was paying for a research
2 project for MST?
3 A. Along with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, I believe
4 that's correct.
5 Q. Now, is the -- is MST used by any other school
6 district in the country of which you are aware for IDEA or
7 Section 504 students?
8 A. There are 100 -- at least 100 teams around the
9 country. All of those teams are in -- within the United
10 States. All of those states are beholden to follow IDEA and
11 Section 504. So my guess is that all of those providers
12 treat children who are in some way affiliated with special
13 education or with Section 504. Whether or not there's a
14 school district that uses MST per se for IDEA kids, I don't
15 know.
16 Q. Now, do you know how much has been spent on the MST
17 project to date?
18 A. I do not.
19 Q. Do you have those figures? You do not?
20 A. No.
21 Q. Now, you referred to this earlier today, sir, about
22 the testimony of Margaret Pereira?
23 A. Yeah.
24 Q. And I think you used the phrase, things said in
25 here, meaning this hearing room, I assume?
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1 A. Uh-huh.
2 Q. But you have heard complaints about services --
3 about the services that were being rendered in the MST
4 program?
5 A. Yes. You know, as I was working both as the
6 coordinator and then as sort of a clinical director, clinical
7 supervisor, complaints would trickle in from different
8 quarters, and a lot of those were brush fires, a lot of those
9 were, for example, helping the providers to better understand
10 how to communicate with the schools so that they weren't
11 rushing in saying, no, here's how you have to do it, when in
12 fact the schools might have a great deal to offer about how
13 it actually could be done and just needed some support. But
14 if you're referring to sort of a litany of complaints that
15 were all of the same theme, my answer would be no.
16 Q. What about complaints, sir, that there was little
17 documentation of services provided to children and there was
18 very little, if any, paperwork?
19 A. Is that for the continuum or is that for --
20 Q. In the MST continuum program.
21 A. In the MST continuum program. That would be
22 incorrect. Our documentation, when it's been handed over to
23 the family guidance centers, many of the family guidance
24 centers have said can't believe how much information there is
25 here. There have been times -- I'll be very honest with you.
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1 There is no clinician in the world that likes the paperwork
2 as much as they like working directly with kids, myself is
3 amongst them, and so there are times when you really have to
4 put a little heat to clinicians to get them to write down the
5 things that they've been doing, but the documentation was in
6 accordance with the clinical standards of division, and I
7 don't think that there is anything that is missing from those
8 charts, and in fact I think there is probably a lot of added
9 information in much of those charts.
10 Q. You agree that documentation of services -- it
11 would be a critical part of providing services?
12 A. Absolutely.
13 Q. Now, what about in the home-based program in terms
14 of problems with documentation of services provided to
15 children, problems with paperwork?
16 A. I would have no information about that. I have yet
17 to hear that complaint.
18 Q. How about complaints about therapists from the
19 mainland not being culturally sensitive to the families they
20 were serving?
21 A. I think a couple of things about that. Yes, by and
22 large there is sort of a settling in period. It's not all
23 that different from when you move -- you know, when I moved
24 from Rhode Island to South Carolina, you know, people were
25 basically saying, you know, you're a Yankee, you're never
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1 going to be accepted here. I do think that there are rules
2 of being culturally sensitive that one needs to learn in
3 order to adjust and to feel -- to help families engage in a
4 process that can be difficult for them. However, I also
5 think that at times that there's a little bit of a red
6 herring there.
7 My clinicians were accountable for outcomes, that
8 if families aren't doing better as a result of getting MST in
9 the continuum or in the home-based program, then there are a
10 number of factors that we can look at. Some is -- one of
11 them is the cultural interface between the clinician and the
12 family. There are many other factors that we could also,
13 however, look at. I will say that one of the things that the
14 continuum tried to do was to bring in family resource
15 specialists that had a better understanding not only of the
16 culture of the island but also the culture of specific
17 neighborhoods and would then be able to help clinicians
18 develop those skills that would allow them to engage families
19 effectively and to do the job that they were hired to do.
20 I have heard that one of our family resource
21 specialists resented the fact that she was asked to help take
22 maybe, you know, a cultural edge off of some of our
23 clinicians, and that to me is antithetical to good clinical
24 skills. If somebody is lacking any kind of clinical skill,
25 whether it be a cultural mismatch, whether it be a
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1 misunderstanding of how to treat a certain kind of disorder,
2 the responsibility for professionals is to be able to enhance
3 their skill set so that they are able to do the things that
4 they are weak in.
5 Q. So there were these complaints about therapists
6 from the mainland not being culturally sensitive to families
7 they were serving?
8 A. I did not hear any complaint directly. I have
9 heard that the complaint had been brought up.
10 Q. Usually that would be how you heard complaints,
11 wouldn't it, from someone else?
12 A. It was brought up by a family resource specialist
13 who had been involved in some race bating.
14 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA: Now would be
15 appropriate.
16 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Members, we
17 want to give our court reporter a break, so we'll take a
18 five-minute recess.
19 (Recess taken.)
20 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Members, we'll
21 reconvene our hearing and continue with questioning by
22 Mr. Kawashima.
23 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA: Thank you, Chair
24 Saiki.
25 Q. Now, there also, Mr. Donkervoet, have been issues
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1 or complaints raised about the control group that was formed
2 for the continuum and the fact that selection of the children
3 and families for the control group was not random. Are you
4 aware of that complaint, that issue?
5 A. I have heard that that allegation was raised here.
6 Q. Is that allegation correct or not correct?
7 A. I have no information -- it would completely sully
8 the water dramatically if that were the case. I have no
9 information whatsoever of that being anything but an entirely
10 impartial -- the recruiters went out, they recruited a
11 family, they carried with them an envelope, and when that
12 envelope was opened it was determined whether or not they
13 were in MST or in the control group. We had a number of
14 people recruiting. I have pretty much faith in their
15 integrity, and so that allegation came as a complete surprise
16 to me.
17 Q. So you're not aware of any instance where an
18 envelope was switched so that a particular student was placed
19 within the continuum? You're not aware of that?
20 A. Not at all.
21 Q. And as you already testified, you would agree that
22 if in fact that happened, it would affect the integrity of
23 the results of the continuum?
24 A. That is absolutely true.
25 Q. Now, who hired the staff for the MST, for the
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1 program, the therapists?
2 A. The therapists, the crisis case managers were hired
3 primarily by myself and Dr. Terry Lee, and the administrative
4 people were brought on by people at division, so the person
5 who ran the calling up of the families and doing TAMs, which
6 is the therapist adherence measure of tracking. The
7 researchers were hired by University of Hawaii, I believe.
8 It might be through UAP, and lastly the family resource
9 specialists were initially hired by Hawaii Families as
10 Allies, but we then began interviewing with them after a
11 short bit.
12 Q. There's a suggestion -- allegation that people were
13 actually hired over the Internet. Is that a correct
14 statement?
15 A. That is not a correct statement.
16 Q. Not at all -- not in any way located or hired
17 through the Internet?
18 A. No. We did -- excuse me. MST does have -- MST
19 Services, Inc. -- actually, I don't think they are Inc. any
20 longer, but they do have an Internet site where teams are
21 allowed to put postings for job openings so that -- because
22 it's difficult to find the quality of therapists that you
23 want for an MST program. It's very intensive work. These
24 guys are on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week. They are very
25 closely supervised. They are held accountable for outcomes
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1 for their families. They are expected to audiotape their
2 sessions. So there's a lot of onerous details that don't go
3 into other kinds of clinical work, and so there is a place to
4 put job postings up on the MST Services Internet site, and I
5 do believe that Terry Lee took advantage of that.
6 I did not check the site. We certainly did talk to
7 people at different conferences about what we were doing here
8 in the hopes -- because we had -- to be very honest you, we
9 had a very difficult time recruiting clinicians in house. We
10 didn't get a lot of responses, and sometimes those responses
11 were people we didn't feel were completely qualified or who,
12 frankly, once they heard what the job entailed weren't
13 interest in it.
14 Q. Were there people who were hired who did not have
15 clinical backgrounds?
16 A. No.
17 Q. And as far as you are aware, the posting by Dr. Lee
18 on the Website, are you aware as to whether or not it
19 resulted in any -- any personnel being hired?
20 A. You know, to be honest with you, let me even
21 retract that. I'm not certain that he posted. We talked
22 about that as an option, so I'm not even certain whether he
23 did post.
24 Q. You have not seen that?
25 A. I have not seen it. I do know that there were
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1 people that contacted us -- I mean, we had a small handful of
2 people who came from the mainland, but how they heard about
3 the position openings, I'm not familiar.
4 Q. All right. Now, is Hawaii one of the two sites
5 that was experimenting with MST for problems other than
6 conduct disorders, the other site being Philadelphia?
7 A. No, that's also not correct. There are a number of
8 sites that are looking at MST in working with a variety of
9 populations that has not been tried on before. There is a
10 study at Vanderbilt University right now under Barr Wyse that
11 is looking at the application of MST for kids who are latency
12 age, so we're talking about like seven to 12 year olds, kids
13 who are oppositional defiant sort of on their way to becoming
14 hard core delinquents.
15 There is a long-term study, I think it's at the
16 University of Missouri, but I prefer not to be quoted on
17 that. Chuck Pordune has just finished up a long-term study
18 in looking at MST with juvenile sex offenders, and then
19 Philadelphia is the other site that has a continuum project
20 that is going on, but -- so at the present time there are
21 many sites that are doing things to try and make MST fit with
22 the population that they are working with. It is that there
23 were two sites where continua were being set up to service
24 seriously emotionally disturbed kids.
25 Q. I think that's the question I was asking you, as to
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1 whether or not there were two sites that were actually
2 experimenting with MST for problems other than conduct
3 disorders?
4 A. And as I said, that's not accurate. There are
5 other experiments with MST that are going on around not only
6 this country but in other countries as well.
7 Q. When you say experiments, they are experiments of
8 the nature that was happening here in Hawaii with your
9 continuum?
10 A. Well, as with any kind of experiment, it doesn't
11 make a whole lot of sense to look at the same thing, you
12 know, in a million different places, that, you know,
13 basically if you have two or three experiments, you've
14 basically set it up, you've done replication, you've proven
15 it works or proven it hasn't worked and then you can
16 disseminate it. So in other places they may be looking at it
17 with different kinds of populations but not necessarily along
18 the lines of a continua. Why would you want to set up ten of
19 those if you're not sure it's going to work? Why not wait to
20 see if the two that you have set up do work and then begin to
21 broaden out the technology or figure out what it is that does
22 or doesn't work and improve upon it and try that, which is
23 how good science occurs. They come up with a theory, they
24 apply it to a certain population, if it works, they reapply
25 it to replicate it, usually under a different experimenter,
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1 and then if it works again, then you can go out and train
2 other people to do it and improve upon it.
3 Q. Unfortunately, the continuum here had be
4 discontinued, right?
5 A. That's correct.
6 Q. How about the one in Philadelphia, how is that
7 working?
8 A. The one in Philadelphia, after two years of setup
9 time, my understanding was that, you know, as of July and
10 August -- in August and/or August they accepted their first
11 one or two clients, so they were doing it in a much more
12 measured way with a lot more negotiation that occurred
13 beforehand, and we actually capitalized on a lot of their
14 work in trying to get our continuum set up.
15 Q. Am I correct, then, as far as any validation of the
16 use of MST for problems other than conduct disorders, there's
17 not been a study or experiment that has validated the use of
18 MST?
19 A. That's been asked and answered. Yes, there is a
20 study. They just finished a five-year NIMH psychiatric
21 hospitalization study at --
22 Q. Where was that, sir?
23 A. Charleston, South Carolina, where they looked at
24 using MST -- kids would arrive at the hospital in an
25 ambulance or with their parents --
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1 Q. Just a second. Are these the ones with severe
2 disorders?
3 A. Severe emotional problems.
4 Q. You told me about that.
5 A. I did, yes.
6 Q. Thank you. Now, when the families, though, were --
7 strike that.
8 The continuum was conducted on the Leeward coast of
9 Oahu?
10 A. Throughout the island of Oahu.
11 Q. Throughout the island?
12 A. That's correct.
13 Q. Where was the office of the program, the continuum
14 project, located?
15 A. It was at Sunset -- on Sunset Avenue in the Wilcox
16 Building.
17 Q. And where is that, Wahiawa?
18 A. Right down the street from Leahi Hospital.
19 Q. Oh, I see. So you didn't focus on one portion of
20 the island?
21 A. No.
22 Q. You looked at students from all around the island
23 of Oahu, was it?
24 A. That's correct.
25 Q. The families that were actually recruited for the
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1 continuum project were told that the project was going to
2 last for two years?
3 A. That is correct.
4 Q. Now, there have been complaints, though, sir, that
5 when the project was abruptly discontinued, that families
6 only had two days' notice that the project was ending?
7 A. That is incorrect.
8 Q. How many days' notice did they have?
9 A. Well, families had a variety of notice depending on
10 where they were. There were a number of families that we had
11 titrated the treatment down because they had been successful
12 in what we had been doing with them. They had affected
13 changes, things were different enough in the families and for
14 the kids that they were back in school and doing reasonably
15 well and we could feel confident in getting those kids back
16 to the family guidance centers. For all of these families,
17 we made some suggestions as to the amount of time they might
18 want to continue to MST -- continue with MST, and for a
19 couple of families the kids had been doing so well and we had
20 cut down the amount of time that we were spending on them to
21 such an extent that we really sort of said, you know, maybe
22 just one more meeting is all it will take since we are only
23 meeting once every two weeks anyway and you can transition
24 back. For some of the other families, I imagine that they
25 are just finally closing out the cases. So it was a
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1 broadband of time. No family got abruptly shuttled aside
2 with just two days' notice. That truly is an inaccurate
3 statement.
4 Q. The announcement of the discontinuation of the
5 project, though, occurred in August of this yea?
6 A. That would be correct.
7 Q. Had you resigned by then or not?
8 A. No, I had not. October 3rd.
9 Q. Were you the person, then, in charge of
10 implementing the discontinuation?
11 A. Yes, I was. As clinical supervisor that was my
12 responsibility.
13 Q. Now, there are also claims that services to
14 students were abruptly stopped. Is that a correct statement
15 or not?
16 A. I don't see how that could be a correct statement.
17 By and large what happened -- the process that we went
18 through for each and every one of these kids was to, A, start
19 by informing the staff, because certainly their jobs were
20 what we were terminating in short order, and then, B, discuss
21 with the families that the research part of the continuum was
22 ending and that we were uncertain as to how long the
23 continuum without the research part would continue on, that
24 that was still under discussion, but we did tell them that
25 what we needed to do was to convene their IEP team, sit down,
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1 talk about what -- the services that they had been delivered,
2 how well the child was functioning, and make a determination
3 about what services would be needed in the future, and then
4 after that to hold a coordinated service plan.
5 Now, in some of the school districts the teams
6 wanted to go through what's called a peer review process,
7 which is a determination as to whether a child is high end or
8 low end. So that would be a determination as to whether or
9 not the services would all emanate out of the school system
10 or whether they would emanate out of the family guidance
11 center and the case would have a care coordinator who is an
12 employee of the Department of Health, and by and large what
13 we did is that in some cases when they were just going back
14 to the school level, then we would back out of the case. The
15 IEP would be held or the 504 plan and other services would be
16 placed in either by school-based providers or by people from
17 the larger provider network. I've forgotten your question in
18 all of that. What did you ask?
19 Q. Whether or not there was an abrupt ending of
20 services to students.
21 A. No.
22 Q. Let me ask you this, though.
23 A. There should have been a transition.
24 Q. There must have been a period of time, and I'm sure
25 it varied among the students, as to when the continuum was
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1 announced to be ending, in other words, it was going to be
2 discontinued until the IEPs, for example, took place. What
3 is the range of time that that period of time took place?
4 A. Geez. We had some families that wanted to hold off
5 for a couple of weeks until the child was, you know,
6 ensconced in the new school and then we had some families
7 that said, well, let's do it right now, and we had one family
8 that basically said let's have the IEP and then when that IEP
9 is shut I'm pulling my child out of the public school, I'm
10 putting her into a private school, and I'm done with this
11 whole Felix mess.
12 Q. Now, were the therapists during this continuation
13 process instructed not to have further contact with the
14 patients?
15 A. No, no.
16 Q. That any statement to that effect would not be
17 correct?
18 A. That they are the -- the therapists were instructed
19 and good practice is that you don't have contact with a
20 patient or a family -- and I don't refer to them as
21 patients -- with the kids or the families after you have
22 resigned your position because at that point in time the
23 Department of Health can no longer really assume, you know,
24 liability for the decisions that you're making and we're not
25 supervising the treatment that's being provided.
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1 So if I were seeing your daughter, let's say, and I
2 don't know that you have one, it's a hypothetical, and I knew
3 that my employment was going to end on November 2nd, I would
4 really be working beforehand to say to your daughter and to
5 say to your family, we're going to be ending on November 2nd
6 and we really need to finish up completely by that date
7 because I can't come over on the 3rd and the 4th to say hi.
8 Some families are very willing to have that occur.
9 Some families don't want any further contact with previous
10 therapists. Sometimes kids call you on the phone, you know,
11 and try and get you to take them to McDonald's, others don't,
12 but it really is fair to say that the -- that the actual
13 contact should stop on a date, but it does not stop really
14 until the date that you've closed out the case and don't have
15 any contact and certainly the last day of employment.
16 Q. Was that one of the things the therapists did, take
17 the students to McDonald's?
18 A. Yeah, there would be -- certainly be times that we
19 would reward a kid for a particular kind of behavior by
20 taking them to McDonald's, taking them on hikes, doing
21 different kinds of activities with them, absolutely. These
22 are kids that come from, you know, sometimes pretty
23 impoverished backgrounds, and so something like, you know, a
24 Happy Meal which for many of us in this room is like, well,
25 we stop on the way home anyway to get something to eat, for
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1 many of these kids it's -- you know, it's a real reward.
2 It's a meaningful thing to help connect with them.
3 Q. So the system had built into it a reward aspect to
4 it?
5 A. Well, you know, that's a good question. We
6 initially had a certain amount of monies that were allocated
7 at HFAA to kind of do a combination of things, to purchase
8 small rewards for kids, but we also did a lot of -- Punahou
9 donated a lot of clothing, because, you know, these are kids
10 that would wind up going to group homes and not have any
11 underwear, for example, and Punahou did a lot to donate some
12 clothing for us, and HFAA did a great job around Christmas
13 time in getting toys from sort of the motorcycle Toys for
14 Tots drive, which allowed us to get most each -- most of the
15 kids something that would be meaningful to them in households
16 where they might not get anything, and so there were small
17 amounts of money that were allocated and then there were lots
18 of donations that were also garnished.
19 Q. The question I asked you, sir, was did the MST
20 system as it was implemented have a reward aspect to it as an
21 integral part of the program?
22 A. Okay. Now, any good mental health --
23 Q. Did it or did it not? The question is a yes or no,
24 then I'll let you explain.
25 A. Sure.
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1 Q. Did it or did it not?
2 A. Yes, it did.
3 Q. It did. And is that what you're talking about, the
4 amount that was allocated for those types of rewards?
5 A. No, and I need to make this very clear. MST is
6 based on the idea that what you want to do is to change the
7 way that a family is functioning, change the way that the
8 environment around the child is functioning to the extent
9 that you are no longer needed there as a service provider,
10 that the service providers in general aren't needed. Now,
11 how do you go about doing that? Well, lots of parents aren't
12 really aware about how to discipline or how to construct, you
13 know, positive behavioral kinds of supports in their
14 households. All of us give our kids or should give our kids
15 a certain amount of praise or maybe have an allowance for our
16 kid or when they do something really terrific over the course
17 of the week we take them to the movies.
18 By and large, with MST, we are going into families
19 that either haven't been doing that for whatever reason, you
20 know, maybe they've just gotten so tired of their adolescent
21 that all they can do is have negative words with them, or
22 they may be so impoverished that they're not be able to
23 afford those kinds of rewards for kids. And so what we would
24 try and do as much as is possible is to focus our energy on
25 helping parents figure out how they can provide praise and
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1 support, provide the kinds of rewards that are very normative
2 for kids, provide real life experiences with pro social kinds
3 of kids.
4 And sometimes parents had the natural resources
5 available to them in order to be able to do that and
6 sometimes clinicians would try and do things out of their own
7 pockets to help a family, and then there were other times
8 that we had small amounts of money that we would try and get
9 reimbursed for in order to -- any program for any child is
10 not just based on punishment. It is also based on rewards.
11 That's not limited to MST. That goes on in every special ed
12 classroom that you will find around the state, that when kids
13 do well, they get a little prize, and sometimes that prize
14 comes out of the Department of Education's budget, sometimes
15 that prize comes out of the special education teacher's
16 budget. It's very common in mental health. It is not just
17 typical in MST.
18 Q. But it is an integral part of the program, that
19 there be this aspect of rewards for the student?
20 A. To reward kids for positive behavior, you bet.
21 Q. And what you're suggesting is this reward that
22 would be given by the therapists would essentially take the
23 place of the parent not being able to afford to give that
24 reward so the therapist gives it, right?
25 A. No. That would be -- that would be a misnomer, and
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1 basically what we are saying is that there are times that
2 problems -- families are encountering problems that the
3 therapist needs to really show and hold their hand until the
4 family can develop skills in order to be able to do it
5 themselves.
6 Q. I think we're getting far afield here. You
7 testified that as a part of the program sometimes rewards
8 were given to these students?
9 A. That is correct.
10 Q. And sometimes they were given because the parents
11 couldn't afford to give the rewards?
12 A. On occasion, that is absolutely correct.
13 Q. And so that the program takes the place of the
14 parent giving the reward?
15 A. That is incorrect.
16 Q. Who gives the reward?
17 A. We are trying to get parents --
18 Q. Who gives the reward? In that instance, who gives
19 it?
20 A. In that instance?
21 Q. Yes.
22 A. Well, if we can find an aunty, the aunty gives it.
23 Q. If you can't find an aunt, then the therapist gives
24 it, right?
25 A. If there is no one in the natural environment and
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1 we've set up a reward program with a child and we've promised
2 a child a specific reward, yes, usually it will be a
3 professional working with the kid.
4 Q. Usually, as in this case, apparently the student
5 felt comfortable enough that he could call the therapist and
6 say, take me to McDonald's, right?
7 A. That's correct.
8 Q. So that doesn't teach that student to deal with
9 that issue with that student's parents, does it?
10 A. How did that therapist respond in that situation,
11 Mr. Kawashima? You don't know.
12 Q. No, but I do know that the student called the
13 therapist, not their parent, right? Is that correct or not?
14 A. In this particular case --
15 Q. Is that correct or not, that he called the
16 therapist?
17 A. There are times that that would happen, yes.
18 Q. Were the therapists, though, told to discontinue
19 any contact with the students and their families?
20 A. As of the date that they closed their cases.
21 Q. And when you say closed their cases, when would
22 that have been? I'm sure it varied, but when would the last
23 case have been? You may have testified to that. When was
24 the last case closed?
25 A. I no longer work for the Department of Health. I
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1 don't have any --
2 Q. As of the time that you were there, then,
3 apparently there still were some cases that were open?
4 A. That is correct.
5 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA: Thank you. No
6 further questions.
7 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Thank you very
8 much, Mr. Kawashima.
9 Members, we will be imposing the five-minute rule,
10 so we will begin with Vice-Chair Oshiro, followed by
11 Vice-Chair Kokubun.
12 VICE-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE OSHIRO: Thank you,
13 Co-Chair Hanabusa.
14 EXAMINATION
15 BY VICE-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE OSHIRO:
16 Q. I think I heard you say earlier that all of the
17 clinicians and therapists that you folks had hired had some
18 sort of clinical background; is that correct?
19 A. That's correct.
20 Q. And was there any kind of educational qualification
21 that was required?
22 A. The educational qualification was a BA with five
23 years' experience or a master's degree with a year or two
24 years' experience.
25 Q. Okay. Because we had heard testimony I guess
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1 earlier from Ms. Pereira that she found it was strange that
2 some of these clinicians didn't even know what the DSM-IV was
3 or didn't even know how to do their progress notes under the
4 SOAP format, so really, really basic clinical skills she said
5 they were lacking. Do you have any explanation for that?
6 A. Sure. I would say that we are not talking about --
7 first off, we're talking about a model that is not all that
8 interested in diagnosis. We're talking about a model that is
9 much more interested in how well a kid is functioning and
10 what the child's behavior looks like. Secondly, Mrs. Pereira
11 was not within our personnel office nor was she at interviews
12 at the time. And thirdly, the SOAP note thing is SOAP is not
13 a universal notation device. There are other kinds of
14 progress notes that are kept, DAP notes, just basic sort of
15 narrative notes, and so, you know, to know SOAP notes is
16 great if you've worked in an environment that makes SOAP
17 notes mandatory. To not know them just suggests you haven't
18 worked in one of those environments, and I did not until I
19 went to graduate school.
20 Q. I would think that having clinical experience would
21 mean that you have done some of these sort of SOAP notes and
22 because you're dealing with mental health you would know what
23 the DSM-IV is, because isn't that the standard -- I guess
24 that's a resource that tells you what the diagnoses are that
25 are recognized by current science as mental health
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1 conditions?
2 A. Well, I'm also saying it would -- it would surprise
3 me if any of my clinicians didn't know what the DSM-IV was.
4 I find that hard to believe. It does not surprise me that
5 not everybody knew what a SOAP note was because not
6 everybody -- they don't use SOAP notes as the only form of
7 documentation. So, you know, that's sort of like saying,
8 well, you know, I don't know what -- I don't know how to work
9 on a Porsche's engine because I've never worked in an
10 environment where anyone's driven in with a Porsche, but you
11 can still be a fine mechanic.
12 Q. I guess that also leads me to my next question in
13 terms of the qualifications of these clinicians. We've heard
14 about some of the allegations of cultural insensitivity.
15 A. Uh-huh.
16 Q. Isn't that a really crucial criticism, because what
17 these people are doing are sort of putting themselves into a
18 family and trying to get in there and change the whole
19 familial interactions?
20 A. Yeah.
21 Q. And if you don't know how a culture -- how a family
22 and its culture are so intertwined, how are you able to get
23 in there and actually do anything if you aren't aware of the
24 cultural motivations behind a family?
25 A. That's correct. What do you mean by cultural
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1 sensitivity? What does that -- when you use that phrase, so
2 that I can understand what we're talking about from your
3 perspective.
4 Q. I guess some of the allegations we have heard was
5 that there were these mainlanders coming in and they may not
6 be aware of, I guess, a lot of the cultural differences or
7 the diverseness of cultural differences that we have here in
8 Hawaii.
9 A. But can you give me an example?
10 Q. I don't have any specific examples. That was just
11 a very strong criticism that came about.
12 A. Okay.
13 Q. Specific examples weren't really given. I do
14 recall people saying -- I do recall the allegation being
15 something to the effect that these clinicians did not want to
16 go into some of the lower poverty areas. They felt very
17 uncomfortable about it. They did not feel comfortable
18 dealing with the families in general. They felt very
19 alienated. It was those kind of criticisms that wasn't
20 specific to a particular race or family, but it was a very
21 strong criticism because it does seem to undermine the entire
22 effort of what is being done.
23 A. So when we're talking about culture, we're not
24 really talking, then, about race? You're talking about --
25 the example that you came up with is fear of going into some
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1 of the neighborhoods because they are impoverished, may look
2 a little more rugged. Is that kind of --
3 Q. I think in some instances that is what it was, but
4 I think there's probably other instances where culture, I
5 think, is a lot more broader term than race.
6 A. Okay. So it's a broader term. And what you're
7 saying is that the allegation has been raised that my
8 clinicians were culturally insensitive because they had
9 difficulty interacting with certain families?
10 Q. No. I'm asking you do you think that the
11 allegation of cultural insensitivity, that's very crucial to
12 what is being done with this MST continuum? I'm not asking
13 you about examples or -- I'm just asking do you agree or not
14 agree that if someone -- if one of your clinicians is
15 culturally insensitive, let's say coming from the mainland,
16 knows nothing about how Hawaii culture is, knows nothing
17 about our history, knows nothing about the diverseness of
18 culture, comes in and then tries to get into a family and
19 change that family's behavior, do you agree that that's very
20 difficult and that sort of undermines the whole effort of the
21 MST continuum? That's my sort of take on this.
22 A. Right. Well, you know, I have to say it's
23 interesting that that's brought up as a criticism, and I
24 think that there has been a lot of move within the field to
25 understand what we mean when we talk about cultural
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1 sensitivity because -- you know, I'm Dutch. I don't even
2 know what it means to be Dutch, and I don't think that that
3 means that somebody coming into my family needs to understand
4 what it means to be Dutch. I think they need to understand
5 what it means to me to be Dutch, and with MST what we're
6 talking about is a modality that gives you access to families
7 in a way that if their heritage is very important to the way
8 that they function, you need to get an understanding of that
9 and to work within that framework. MST is based on
10 understanding what the goals and the needs are from the
11 parent's perspective and being able to work to achieve those
12 goals and satisfy those needs so that the parents feel that
13 there has been real clinical gain as well.
14 I will say there are a number of subcultures within
15 the islands that it's kind of okay to give your kid a decent
16 crack if he or she has not been behaving themselves. That's
17 not okay according to the laws of the state. It's not okay
18 according to anybody at CPS, but do you go in and you say,
19 well, since I'm culturally sensitive, I'm going to allow that
20 behavior to go on, or do you go in as a clinician and say,
21 okay, I need to understand how it is that that behavior makes
22 sense? Oh, they come from this background, hence it was the
23 way they were raised, hence it's culturally appropriate to
24 them. How can I make it make sense to them for a family to
25 understand even though that's the way you were raised, even
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1 though that's okay within your culture now, here it's not
2 okay? So we need to help you figure out other ways of, you
3 know, reprimanding your child or disciplining your child or
4 dealing with your child's behavior that won't get you in
5 significant trouble.
6 And I actually have to say that, you know, if there
7 is sort of a bite to the cultural insensitivity allegation,
8 that's why we had family resource specialists to be there to
9 help new therapists -- to help all therapists better
10 understand what these families were about, what these
11 neighborhoods were about, what these subcultures within these
12 neighborhoods were about and to allow them to feel more
13 comfortable and more skilled in approaching any kind of
14 family.
15 VICE-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE OSHIRO: Thank you.
16 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Vice-Chair
17 Kokubun, followed by Representative Ito.
18 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN: Thank you, Madam
19 Chair.
20 EXAMINATION
21 BY VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN:
22 Q. Mr. Donkervoet, I wanted to follow up with some
23 questions about the Felix Staff Development and Training
24 Institute.
25 A. Sure.
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1 Q. You say it started in 1997?
2 A. That's correct.
3 Q. And this was required by the consent decree?
4 A. Yes. At the time it was an initiative that the
5 departments along with representatives from the federal court
6 felt would really be an asset to improving the skill set of
7 all the people involved.
8 Q. And you also stated in your testimony that it's no
9 longer functioning?
10 A. Not as a separate entity. Training continues.
11 Q. Trainings --
12 A. Its function continues.
13 Q. Right, but the institute itself --
14 A. That's correct.
15 Q. Do you know when that happened?
16 A. I believe that that happened in the year 2000.
17 Q. Did you head the institute?
18 A. For a couple of years, yes.
19 Q. After '97, at the inception for --
20 A. The year of '97 and the year of '98.
21 Q. Did you provide the training?
22 A. I provided a great deal of training in case
23 management and assessment for providers and intensive in-home
24 providers as well and some parts of therapeutic aide. A lot
25 we contracted out. A lot we had done by in state -- in-house
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1 people. Naomi Grossman did a lot of autism training and then
2 Jenny Wells came on and did a lot of autism training along
3 with contracts from the mainland. We had -- Jean Nakasato
4 helped bring in training around effective behavioral supports
5 for the school system and George Sagai's program from
6 Washington.
7 Q. But you did bring people in from --
8 A. We brought people in and then we also utilized --
9 like HFAA has a great bang up therapeutic aide training, so
10 we utilized their kinds of supports and services as well.
11 Q. These were not permanent staff for the institute?
12 A. Well, many of them were permanent staff, many of
13 them were permanent staff and oversaw contracts so that they
14 didn't do training themselves. For example, we had sort of
15 mediation and dispute resolution. At the time IEPs were
16 really obstreperous, you know, angry places, so we were
17 trying to broaden the skill set for schools to be able to
18 kind of problem solve, sort of see their way clearly to a
19 better resolution. So we utilized people at the conflict
20 resolution center at UH along with one of our staff people to
21 help oversee, coordinate the trainings, make sure that the
22 right people were there, invited to be there, participated,
23 and looked after, you know, evaluations and so forth.
24 Q. But the training was directed to DOE personnel and
25 Department of Health personnel?
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1 A. The trainings were directed to a system of care,
2 which is, you know, a thing that I've been very confused for
3 the little that I saw last Saturday. A system of care is
4 really predicated on all children service systems being
5 together and integrated. So we had trainings that also would
6 include family members, would include providers, that would
7 include juvenile justice people, POs, and judges, when they
8 could make it, but that was a relative rarity, and certainly
9 CPS kinds of people. We really tried to make it so that the
10 information reached and touched as many people that were
11 interfacing with Felix class kids as possible.
12 Q. As the director, do you have an idea how this was
13 funded? What was the source of funding for the institute?
14 A. The source of funding, it came from monies that
15 were made available in equal amounts from the Department of
16 Education and the Department of Health, and those monies also
17 broke down into positions. So like my position was funded by
18 the Department of Education, and that was included in the
19 monies that they forwarded to the institute. And then we did
20 spend a lot of time billing appropriately for Title 4(E)
21 monies from the federal government.
22 And really when you're training for these kinds of
23 kids -- for professionals working with these kinds of kids,
24 the whole point of training is to train so they use
25 appropriate kinds of services and stay out of more intensive
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1 kinds of, you know, hospitalization or HYCF or what have you,
2 and when you do that kind of training, the federal government
3 has set aside certain amounts of monies. So really what you
4 do is you provide a training, then you document everyone who
5 was there, how much time it took, and a figure of the amount
6 of monies it took to put on the training, and then you look
7 to the federal government and they cycle the monies back to
8 the state. So end all, be all, hopefully the monies were
9 shifted back --
10 Q. Reimbursed?
11 A. Yeah, reimbursed from the federal government, but
12 they initially came from the Department of Education,
13 Department of Health.
14 Q. What scale? Any idea what the annual budget might
15 have been?
16 A. Yeah. I believe it was $1.2 million in toto for
17 office supplies, personnel, all trainings.
18 Q. Per year?
19 A. Per year.
20 Q. Was Dr. Groves -- was Dr. Groves involved with the
21 training institute?
22 A. (Witness nods.)
23 Q. What role did he play?
24 A. What role did he play?
25 Q. Yes.
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1 A. You know, he provided some guidance with regards to
2 areas that he -- in monitoring what was happening here with
3 regards to the progress of the consent decree. So he would
4 say, you know, we're really having a lot of complaints
5 because therapeutic aides don't seem to know how to carry out
6 a behavior plan, and so that would be something we then would
7 go back to HFAA and say this is an area that we're -- you're
8 getting a lot of complaints up at the monitor's level, can we
9 focus some attention on. He gave a wide range for the forces
10 at division and for Dr. LeMahieu to sort of set the agenda
11 and make a determination as to where they really saw the
12 priority areas being here every day.
13 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN: My time is
14 running out, but I did have a couple of other questions if
15 the chair would indulge.
16 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Sure.
17 Q. The funding for the training never came from a fund
18 called the ETF, the Employee Training Fund?
19 A. I have never heard of that until this moment, so I
20 don't think so.
21 Q. By the way, have you ever worked previously before
22 coming to Hawaii with Dr. Groves?
23 A. No.
24 Q. How about Lenore Behar?
25 A. No. I knew of her work by reading the literature,
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1 but I never met her until I got here, and didn't recognize
2 her and she was offended.
3 Q. Judy Schrag?
4 A. Knew of her, had never worked with her.
5 Q. Thank you.
6 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN: Thank you, Madam
7 Chair.
8 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
9 Ito, followed by Senator Buen.
10 REPRESENTATIVE ITO: Thank you very much,
11 Madam Co-Chair Hanabusa.
12 EXAMINATION
13 BY REPRESENTATIVE ITO:
14 Q. Doctor, you know, I just wanted to follow up on
15 questions by Senator Kokubun. Were you on loan from the
16 Department of Health when you were doing this Felix
17 Institute?
18 A. No. I had left my position at the Department of
19 Health.
20 Q. So you were an independent consultant?
21 A. No, no, no. I quit my job -- well, resigned is
22 probably a better way of putting it. I resigned by position
23 at the Department of Health and then interviewed with Ivan
24 Barney and Janet Takemura along with a pool of other
25 applicants for the Felix Staff Service Development Institute
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1 and was hired for that position.
2 Q. So how many people did you train during those two
3 years?
4 A. Oh, geez. They have very good records about that,
5 and I would say that -- are you talking about me personally
6 or the institute itself?
7 Q. The institute itself.
8 A. The institute, wow. I would have to say many
9 thousands. Many thousands of people got effective behavioral
10 support training, autism training, case management training,
11 therapeutic aide training, assessment training. It goes on.
12 It was buckets.
13 Q. You know, where was this institute located?
14 A. We were located -- I think it was -- it's directly
15 across the street from the Pan Am building. I think it's
16 1601 Kapiolani on the 9th floor.
17 Q. You know, after you folks disbanded, what happened
18 to all the equipment and supplies?
19 A. The equipment got scavenged by -- you know, there
20 are desks that you see in division, there are desks that you
21 see in -- well, actually I think it was division that pretty
22 much had ponied up all the money for the equipment, so it's
23 over there or it's over at family guidance centers. And
24 incidentally, we had a contract with RCUH in order to be able
25 to procure a little more quickly, and what we were able to
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1 get at Fisher as opposed to the bid list was much higher
2 quality furniture at a fraction of the cost. I considered
3 sort of blowing the whistle on that at some point in time,
4 but decided it was not --
5 Q. You know, you mentioned that some of the students
6 moved from the public schools to the private schools.
7 A. One. One that I'm aware of.
8 Q. Oh, only one student?
9 A. One that I'm aware of, yeah, from our continuum.
10 Q. Right.
11 A. Yeah.
12 Q. What about the overall program?
13 A. From the continuum?
14 Q. Yes.
15 A. By and large they are still in the public school
16 system. Some of them are in foster care, and so that they
17 are still receiving some type of services. We have a couple
18 that were doing great and didn't require any more services,
19 so they probably are just being checked on by their school
20 counselors.
21 Q. You know, what was the name of the private school?
22 A. That would be -- I actually don't know which
23 private school, but my guess is Assets.
24 Q. Do you know how much it costs?
25 A. Oh, we're not paying for it.
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1 Q. The parents are paying for it?
2 A. Yeah. She -- she was -- became very unhappy
3 with -- I don't want to talk because I don't want to specify
4 the child, but yeah, she made a choice to place her child at
5 Assets.
6 Q. Okay, thank you very much.
7 REPRESENTATIVE ITO: Thank you, Madam Chair.
8 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Thank you.
9 Senator Buen, followed by Representative Kawakami.
10 SENATOR BUEN: Thank you, Co-Chair Hanabusa.
11 EXAMINATION
12 BY SENATOR BUEN:
13 Q. Mr. Donkervoet, I have several questions and I'd
14 like to start out by asking you questions regarding the
15 hiring of the clinicians from the mainland.
16 A. Sure.
17 Q. Can you tell me how were these cultural sensitive
18 clinicians from the mainland hired? Did CAMHD conduct the
19 hiring through a formal recruitment and notification process?
20 A. Yes. We had done it a variety of different ways
21 and to much frustration. Initially, we were given sort of --
22 people -- a number of people had sent in letters to apply for
23 care coordinator positions, and although we were not care
24 coordinators, this was a stack of people that were eager to
25 seek employment, and so they were a group of people that I
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1 went about contacting initially. Secondly, all of the family
2 guidance centers were notified that the MST continuum of care
3 was starting up and that we would be looking for positions,
4 and so they got word and a couple of resumes trickled in from
5 that process.
6 Thirdly, we convinced CAMHD to put an advertisement
7 in the newspaper and they did so and from that advertisement
8 we got a handful of people that were interested, and for the
9 national, to be really honest with you, I am uncertain as to
10 how word got out nationally. We were at -- I did go to a
11 conference where I talked with a number of people about this
12 starting. I do know that Terry Lee had been talking with
13 people prior to his arrival and word spread in that way. I
14 can't honestly answer you. I probably should have this
15 answer. I can't honestly answer as to whether or not we put
16 something into the American Psychiatric Association's, you
17 know, monthly newsletter saying that there were positions
18 available and that we were interested.
19 We had really searched -- the truth about a
20 start-up program -- about a new program is that by and large
21 basically all of the talent pool had pretty much been -- were
22 in positions that they were comfortable doing, and there
23 aren't a lot of clinicians who are wandering around without
24 jobs. Well, there's one. You're looking at him, but there
25 aren't a lot of other people that are wandering around just
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1 looking for positions, and so what we really needed to do was
2 kind of beat the bushes and we even resorted to if you know
3 anybody who would be interested in applying for a position.
4 Q. Mr. Donkervoet, how much were these clinicians from
5 the mainland paid?
6 A. We had a scale that I believe ran from something
7 akin to 34,000 to 42,000 is my understanding of the scale,
8 and that would be based on their education and experience.
9 It was -- there's a number of steps within that scale, and so
10 a couple of those clinicians came at the absolute bottom
11 step, one of those clinicians came with 20 years' experience,
12 and to entice him to come with all of that clinical
13 experience all the way from Canada we offered him at the top
14 of that scale.
15 Q. And what was that?
16 A. I think 42,000. In addition to that we had -- they
17 received on-call standby pay because by -- I guess sort of
18 the union rules indicate that if you're on call 24 hours a
19 day or if you're on call for any portion of time, you can get
20 compensated for it.
21 Q. I understand you're not working there at CAMHD
22 anymore, so I was going to ask you if that list could be
23 provided of those clinicians hired from the mainland and the
24 salary amount that they were paid.
25 A. Okay.
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1 Q. Can you get that?
2 A. Probably not, but I can pass it on.
3 SENATOR BUEN: If the chairs may, if we could
4 get that list.
5 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Okay.
6 A. You just want the mainland?
7 Q. Yes, that's what I asked for. What was the morale
8 at CAMHD when the mainland clinicians were hired?
9 A. At division or within the continuum?
10 Q. With CAMHD.
11 A. I think that people have pretty much acknowledged
12 that there are not a lot of available personnel that are not
13 already gainfully employed, so I think that there has been an
14 understanding from the time that I've been here, too many
15 kids and not enough clinicians, and so they are aware of the
16 problem.
17 Q. I have questions on accountability of payment to
18 the service providers that CAMHD had paid out. Does CAMHD
19 have clinical standards for every service category?
20 A. Yes, it does.
21 Q. How are these providers kept accountable for
22 following these standards?
23 A. My understanding of that -- and that's a real
24 distal area to things that I'm involved in, but my
25 understanding is that they have a very thorough contract
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1 performance management review that all contracts go through
2 on a regular basis.
3 Q. I'll continue on later on in that line of
4 questioning.
5 A. Sure.
6 Q. My time is up, so thank you.
7 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Representative
8 Kawakami, followed by Senator Sakamoto.
9 REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI: Thank you very much,
10 Chair Saiki.
11 EXAMINATION
12 BY REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI:
13 Q. I'd like to ask first, Mr. Donkervoet, you were
14 here working at the state hospital, am I correct?
15 A. When I first arrived?
16 Q. Yeah.
17 A. No. I was the clinical director for the child and
18 adolescent -- I was --
19 Q. You never worked at the state hospital?
20 A. I did, but it was three years after I was here.
21 Q. Oh. That's where you left?
22 A. That's when I -- no. I left working the Felix
23 Staff Service Development Institute.
24 Q. Then you went into the state hospital?
25 A. And then I worked for the state hospital.
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1 Q. How long did you work there?
2 A. I think that was about four months.
3 Q. Four months?
4 A. Yeah.
5 Q. And what were you doing?
6 A. I was an E hire utilization review quality
7 assurance individual, so basically my job was I did risk
8 assessments, I went to some of the jails to make a
9 determination as to whether some of the inmates required
10 hospitalization or could be effectively treated in the jail
11 environment, in the prison environment. I did a fair amount
12 of sort of talking with some of the branches about the
13 authorization of ACT teams, which are a sort of community
14 treatment for -- to help keep, you know, adults with severe
15 emotional problems in the community bases, and so I did some
16 authorization and helped work with them to set up a better
17 quality performance system.
18 Q. So did you leave before the results were shown
19 or -- you know, because you're actually asking or letting
20 them know what kind of treatment, et cetera was needed?
21 A. With the team, yes.
22 Q. Did you follow it up? Was there any follow up as
23 far as that or did you leave by then?
24 A. Oh, I -- that was a work in progress. I don't even
25 know whether it's completed at this point, and I certainly
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1 had left before the entire thing was set up.
2 Q. I see. I wanted to ask you, Dr. Munger recruited
3 you to come to Hawaii, am I correct?
4 A. That's correct, yes.
5 Q. So you were good friends?
6 A. We weren't good friends. I had worked with him for
7 about eight months, and I will say that while I was on the
8 mainland, Dr. Munger was the best supervisor I had had up
9 until that point. I really respected the body of literature
10 that he had produced and I really felt that there was a lot
11 that could be learned from him. It was a short period of
12 time. Never interacted with him socially. It was a very
13 different relationship after I arrived.
14 Q. In your mind, how long did he work here? Was it a
15 couple of years?
16 A. I believe it was two years, yeah.
17 Q. Two years. Okay. He resigned kind of abruptly.
18 Do you know the reason?
19 A. I would be remiss -- well, yeah, I do. This is a
20 system that really chews people up over the course of time.
21 It is hard being out there day in, day out. Working with
22 families that are troubled is one thing. Trying to develop a
23 system and working with all of the problems that that can
24 bring up is another thing, and I think that Rich left pretty
25 burnt out. I think that there were a couple of key personnel
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1 at division that had announced their plans to move to other
2 places and I don't think that he felt honestly that he had
3 much more push in him to continue on. He never said that
4 specifically. It's just things that I observed. It is very,
5 very tiring out there. I don't want to sound like a whiner,
6 but, you know, it gets to a point where nobody has ever in
7 the time that I have been here expressed anything even
8 approaching appreciation for the good works that people have
9 gotten done and that's hard. That is hard. And I think it
10 got hard for Rich.
11 Q. I see. When he left here, do you know where he
12 went?
13 A. I believe he went to Asheville, North Carolina.
14 Q. And was doing the same type of thing?
15 A. He was --
16 Q. Pretty much?
17 A. On a smaller scale, and it wasn't system reform. I
18 mean, what was done here is -- nobody has been able to do
19 anyplace else. It's been remarkable, but I believe that he
20 was running a community-based mental health center, yeah.
21 Q. Okay, thank you. Now, I wanted to know what is
22 therapists adherence measure?
23 A. The therapists adherence measure is once a month
24 each one of the families -- I believe it's once a month, but
25 at a certain time interval each family that an MST clinician
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1 is working with receives a phone call from somebody who is
2 going to ask them a series of questions, 20-some questions
3 about what it is, how it is that the therapy has been going.
4 And what they have been able to do is sort of see which of
5 those questions really relate well with how well a family
6 does a couple years down the road, and so it's actually a way
7 of monitoring whether or not therapists are actually doing
8 MST in the field from the family's perspective. And we have
9 been able to distill that if they are adhering, if the
10 sessions are productive, and if there's good family therapist
11 cohesion around the goals that they are working towards,
12 we've been able to determine that there is -- that the
13 more -- the better scores that people get on that measure,
14 the more likely they are to have good outcomes as a family.
15 Those therapists are really better therapists. The other
16 ones need more supervision.
17 There's also a supervisory adherence measure. The
18 clinicians are asked I think once a month about their
19 supervisor's behavior, and we've begun to see in the data --
20 not we. I say we because at one point in time I was
21 affiliated, but the people at MST who have been looking at
22 these measures are beginning to see that the more a
23 supervisor adheres to the principles of MST, the better their
24 therapists are at doing MST and the better the outcomes will
25 be for the family, and they are -- the actual adherence
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1 measures for the home-based teams and for the continuum are
2 included in the packet that was delivered last week.
3 Q. Just one last question. My time is up, but I
4 wanted to find out, we had a lot of high end kids going out
5 of state.
6 A. Yeah.
7 Q. Was the -- after the continuum research, was this
8 program that was instituted where you have -- you talked
9 about the MST program coming in and the high end kids were
10 the ones that you were targeting?
11 A. Targeted, yeah.
12 Q. Was that to kind of take care of these kids going
13 out of state, to cut down on the costs, et cetera, et cetera?
14 A. Well, cut down on cost, you know, hopefully. You
15 know, we didn't finish the project, so we don't have data to
16 really say that we were cost effective or that we weren't.
17 And we can't -- we don't have any data because we didn't
18 finish the project to say that it was better than, you know,
19 going out of state or going to residence clinically for the
20 kids, and the reason for that is that, you know, kids aren't
21 going out of state as much anymore. Kids aren't going into
22 hospitalization or hospital-based residency as much anymore.
23 And, man, I would love to be sitting up here and
24 saying, yeah, it's because of the continuum that that
25 happened, but I can't take any credit for it whatsoever. It
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1 is the family guidance centers and the schools, the
2 complexes, and the support staff at all of those places who
3 have been much, much, much better at formulating plans that
4 are meaningful that help keep kids in the community, in their
5 schools, receiving good treatment, and not requiring these,
6 you know, high cost, highly restrictive kinds of
7 environments. So it was what we were targeted for, but they
8 were already doing it.
9 Q. Thank you very much.
10 REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI: Thank you, Chair
11 Saiki.
12 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Senator
13 Sakamoto, followed by Representative Leong.
14 SENATOR SAKAMOTO: Thank you, Chair.
15 EXAMINATION
16 BY SENATOR SAKAMOTO:
17 Q. Mr. Donkervoet, I guess in listening to what you
18 were saying you had many different jobs, I guess, here and
19 other places. Several of your jobs were related to
20 utilization review, patient assessment, you're even teaching
21 a class in child assessment and treatment.
22 A. Yeah.
23 Q. So I'm interested, I guess, in what assessments and
24 measurements do we have in place that are not lacking data
25 because we didn't finish, as you just mentioned? What do we
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1 have in place that we're using as our standards, not just MST
2 but globally now?
3 A. Right. Well, if you're talking about treatment --
4 Q. Excuse me. Short answer, please.
5 A. Very subtle. I think the way that we are really
6 looking at system improvement is with Ivor Groves' service
7 testing instrument, and I will say that although I had
8 initial reservations about the methodology around that
9 instrument, that since hearing what they have to say
10 nationally about looking at an individual child and how
11 everyone is operating around that child, I actually think
12 that Dr. Groves has been beating the drum for a number of
13 years that now the field is kind of catching up to. That's
14 the primary way we examine whether or not the system as a
15 whole is functioning.
16 For each individual kid you might use a variety of
17 different measures that have been validated, but that -- you
18 know, the Child Behavior Checklist is very common in our
19 system. The Child and Adolescent Functional System Scale is
20 very common in our system. The CA Locus, which I'm under
21 informed about, is very common in our system, and all of
22 these are ways that help takes a look at whether a kid is
23 making progress.
24 Q. Is there a place, a binder that includes these
25 different measures that we're saying system-wide child mental
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1 health and now school-based behavioral health has -- here are
2 12, 20, 40 different measures that we've been tracking?
3 A. Consolidated? I wouldn't have an answer for that.
4 Q. How difficult would it be to get to that point,
5 especially now that we're transitioning and the choice would
6 be between, you know, which type of provider, school-based or
7 clinical or private provider?
8 A. Since I'm locked out of all Department of Health
9 buildings, it would be difficult for me. It would probably
10 be relatively easy for you if that's something you'd want.
11 Q. It seems I agree with you, system-wide we need to
12 have some kind of agreement, and I feel for the children who
13 are being bounced from one type of system to another, but if
14 we all work together, we can all get it down.
15 A. And, actually, I think one of the things that's
16 allowing for all of the complexes to look as good as they are
17 when they're going through service testing, the transitions
18 back and forth are looking great. They're really looking
19 good. Whether or not all those measures are collected, they
20 could be very easily. That would not be a problem.
21 Q. Changing from that, you mentioned foster care, and
22 I'm sort of particularly interested because I believe many of
23 the problems deal with foster care transitions.
24 A. Yeah.
25 Q. When you're doing the MST, about how many -- what
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1 percent of that population were foster children?
2 A. Well, I think when you're talking about the
3 home-based foster care -- I mean the home-based MST, very
4 few. When you're talking about the continuum, we're talking
5 about kids that are constantly on the cusp of needing to be
6 hospitalized, and so we tried to use foster care with some
7 frequency to -- I mean, I've walked into a family's household
8 where the father literally has said, if you don't get him out
9 of here, I'm going to kill him. And, you know, after years
10 of just, you know, having to constantly set limits and having
11 things broken around the household, you know, I have a great
12 deal of empathy for that. And to maintain the integrity of
13 that family, if I can move a child for four days and put them
14 in foster care while I work intensely with the parents to
15 make it an environment that's more able to meet his needs,
16 that's a clinical judgment that I'm willing to make. So
17 foster care is something that we relied on in a number of
18 different ways.
19 We had some families that no matter -- the
20 different kinds of effort that we put into it they just --
21 they had either gotten fed up with their children or they had
22 their own substance abuse or mental health problems
23 themselves that it was not a good environment to return a
24 child to. So in the continuum we used foster care with
25 regularity if we couldn't find a natural informal resource.
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1 There wasn't an aunty. At one time we tried to use the
2 priest at the child's church as a place to just sort of --
3 you know, respite for the parents. With the home-based it is
4 much less frequent, that they try and maintain those kids.
5 The continuum was set up for a different set of kids that are
6 much more volatile and much more likely to bottom out in the
7 community and need a place to go.
8 Q. Changing the direction.
9 A. Sure.
10 Q. Back to the National Institute of Mental Health,
11 many times people apply for grants to get money to do the
12 study --
13 A. Yeah.
14 Q. -- as opposed to us doing the study and other
15 people benefitting by studies. Did we receive a grant from
16 the National Institute of Mental Health?
17 A. We did not. I think a proposal was written after
18 we started. I do know that the Annie E. Casey Foundation
19 ponied up $100,000 for the research on the MST continuum.
20 The service itself, however, I believe that Hawaii was
21 paying. It is not very frequent that it's not federally
22 funded, but it does happen.
23 Q. Are you aware if any wrote a report or presented
24 papers or was compensated for any of the work even though it
25 wasn't finished but in process?
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1 A. We did -- Terry Lee and I did a presentation
2 together in Georgia just to, you know, tell the mental health
3 world that the continuum was being set up and we were very
4 pleased with how it was going. I don't believe anyone has
5 been compensated by that work.
6 Q. Thank you.
7 A. Sure.
8 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
9 Representative Leong, followed by Representative Marumoto.
10 REPRESENTATIVE LEONG: Thank you, Chair Saiki.
11 EXAMINATION
12 BY REPRESENTATIVE LEONG:
13 Q. Sir, when Margaret came in and talked to us, I was
14 kind of interested and concerned when she stated that
15 oftentimes misinformation in cases were recorded which
16 resulted in that payments were made for things that shouldn't
17 have happened. Can you reflect on that?
18 A. I don't know exactly the statement that was made,
19 so can I ask for a little bit of clarity on that?
20 Q. It had to do with parents, going to the homes and
21 they really weren't there and they were receiving payment for
22 that.
23 A. Well, all of the MST therapists are full-time
24 employees, and the reason for that is that we ask them to be
25 on call all of the time, and our expectation is they are
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1 going to do whatever it's going to take to kind of -- we had
2 a number of families that were avoidants and yes, our
3 therapists would show up at their house and they wouldn't be
4 there, and so they would have to go back three or four times
5 to a house, but that person would be on the payroll as
6 opposed to billing separate hours for it, the same as the
7 home-based. So they were billing, but it was their job.
8 Sometimes we had to go to Zippy's at 6:00 in the morning.
9 Q. Zippy's at 6:30 in the morning?
10 A. 6:30 in the morning because that's the only time a
11 working parent would have.
12 Q. Then I also had a question on that. She said they
13 were informed that the managers didn't need to keep such
14 clear documentation of it, and my concern of it is that if
15 you don't have clear documentation and you're trying to
16 equate this program, how can you fairly equate the MST
17 program?
18 A. Right, and actually, everything is -- was
19 extraordinarily well documented. Not only were we tracking
20 the number of minutes that people were doing each day,
21 different activities, we were also tracking -- just through
22 regular progress notes we were tracking every dime that got
23 spent, including when there were additional services that
24 were provided, because you can't make an accurate, fair cost
25 comparison if you say, well, we're not going to include that
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1 this child was in foster care while in MST. Everything was
2 documented.
3 Q. Also in the back of my mind a statement that was
4 made that when they were trying to determine which parents
5 would come into the MST program, that the envelopes were
6 switched?
7 A. I have no knowledge about that. That would
8 completely muddy up the study itself and --
9 Q. So you don't know about that?
10 A. And I would be -- I would be very upset if that
11 were occurring.
12 Q. And you also mentioned an HFAA program that
13 assisted you, and when they came in the co-directors were
14 given the position of co-directors but they did not have any
15 training such as yours or they were like high school
16 graduates and they were also helping people in the community?
17 A. Right, and I think that, you know, there is one
18 thing that's very clear in the literature, and that is that
19 having a highfalutin degree doesn't make you a better helper,
20 that, you know, we can -- that you can -- if you've been
21 there, you understand and you can communicate effectively
22 with people, that can make you just as much of a helper as
23 somebody who has a master's degree, a Ph.D., or -- well, an
24 M.D., of course, because you've got the whole medication
25 thing that goes along with it.
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1 Q. And my last question is who is Dr. Terry Lee?
2 A. He's a board certified child psychiatrist and he
3 was our medical director, and he's currently on faculty at
4 the University of Hawaii and does work with the Central
5 Family Guidance Center, is my understanding.
6 Q. Thank you. No more questions, sir.
7 REPRESENTATIVE LEONG: Thank you, Chair.
8 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
9 Representative Marumoto followed by Co-Chair Hanabusa
10 EXAMINATION
11 BY REPRESENTATIVE MARUMOTO:
12 Q. Good morning. It's still morning. You mentioned
13 that MST Incorporated is owned by a few people, and I'm
14 wondering if you are in their employ in any way?
15 A. No, I am not.
16 Q. Are you a consultant to them?
17 A. No.
18 Q. Do you receive any payments?
19 A. No.
20 Q. You talked about complaints about TAs. That was
21 brought up.
22 A. Yeah.
23 Q. And you said you go to HFAA, is that friends
24 families -- Families Friends and Allies?
25 A. Hawaii's Families as Allies. Parent support.
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1 Q. A parent support group?
2 A. Right.
3 Q. If there were complaints about TAs, I would take it
4 to the TA or their superior or the clinical director and try
5 and iron out the problem. I would talk to the parents. Why
6 do you go to this family support group?
7 A. Okay. I confused you. I apologize. Here's what
8 the deal with that would be. If it were, you know, an
9 ongoing problem with a number of TAs, you want to go back to
10 the people that are training TAs and sort of say, you know,
11 can we manipulate the training so we make sure this
12 information gets across. If it is about an individual
13 person's behavior, absolutely. My kind of approach to that
14 is try and approach the person directly first. If that
15 doesn't work, talk with the supervisor.
16 Q. Well, it doesn't make any sense to go to, you know,
17 HFFA first. I was very puzzled as to that. What percent of
18 the special ed children are covered by MST?
19 A. A tiny fraction. If you're talking about 14,000
20 kids that are in special ed -- I'm just grabbing a
21 ballpark -- and you're talking about at any given time 160 of
22 those kids can be served by the home-based teams, and then we
23 would have served no more than a hundred or two during our
24 research project, you know, you're really talking about a
25 fraction of a percentage.
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1 Q. I don't understand why you were recruiting for this
2 program, why you are sort of marketing for it and trying to
3 in effect drum up business for it?
4 A. That's also a good question. If we can't -- you
5 can never insist that an individual or a family participate
6 in a research project, because I could not in good conscience
7 say to a family, first off, that they would get MST or they
8 would just be allowed to stay in usual services, or -- and I
9 also could never say to them, look, this is going to work
10 better than usual services, because I didn't know that. We
11 don't have that information. It's not available. I think it
12 would. I would like to stay that it would, but until the
13 data is in and the research is completed, I can't make any
14 kind of promise about how things are going to turn out for
15 them. You can never do that in mental health. So when I say
16 recruitment, basically a family who would eligible to
17 participate in the study would be approached by a recruiter
18 and they would be offered it as an option. This is a study
19 that the state is trying to undertake. It's going to look at
20 all services eventually, but we're interested in whether or
21 not you would like yourself and your child to participate,
22 and there's no guarantee that you will get one condition or
23 the other.
24 Q. There was -- you know, when you go to a doctor, the
25 doctor generally prescribes a medicine and generally a
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1 patient doesn't walk in there and say I want a certain type
2 of medicine or therapy unless they've seen it on TV, but this
3 way they were sold this type of therapy and everybody is
4 expecting it and when they don't get it in the envelope, they
5 were disappointed, but whoever was put in that envelope, my
6 understanding is, you were the one who put the names into one
7 envelope or another?
8 A. No, that is not correct. That was --
9 Q. How was that determined?
10 A. We received those envelopes by --
11 Q. Who determined it?
12 A. -- from Charleston, South Carolina. It was
13 determined by a random number selection in a computer. It's
14 done by a random number program. That's how science has to
15 be done. You can't -- you can't say this one gets A, this
16 one gets B, this one gets A, this one gets B. It's got to be
17 done purely impartially and they have very sophisticated
18 random number selectors that do that.
19 Q. There was testimony contrary to that.
20 A. That's -- that is how that is done. We didn't
21 insert anything into any envelopes, and the recruiter should
22 be the only ones taking things out of the envelopes.
23 REPRESENTATIVE MARUMOTO: Thank you.
24 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
25 Co-Chair Hanabusa.
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1 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Yes, thank you.
2 EXAMINATION
3 BY CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA:
4 Q. How exactly do you pronounce your last name?
5 A. Oh, it's Donkervoet.
6 Q. Donkervoet.
7 A. But thanks.
8 Q. Since you mentioned that we're not pronouncing it
9 correctly, I thought we should all learn. Now,
10 Dr. Donkervoet, when did the continuum project start?
11 A. The continuum project started in July of last year,
12 July 1st was supposed to be its start date.
13 Q. July 1st, 2000?
14 A. That's correct.
15 Q. And when did it terminate?
16 A. It was -- its termination date is November 5th of
17 this year.
18 Q. 2001. But the families have been notified that the
19 services will be terminating on November 5, 2001?
20 A. And by and large I think they have -- should all
21 have been transferred or are very close to being fully
22 transferred by this point.
23 Q. Fully transferred to where?
24 A. Back to the family guidance centers or to
25 school-based mental health, depending on the needs of the
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1 child.
2 Q. When did the people servicing under the MST
3 continuum cease to service?
4 A. My last day was on October 3rd. There were -- I am
5 uncertain. I would say probably 15 families maybe, maybe a
6 few more that were in the process of being transferred back
7 to the family guidance centers and the school-based mental
8 health.
9 Q. And how many families did you have?
10 A. In toto?
11 Q. In total in the continuum.
12 A. In the continuum. I think we reached a census
13 of -- you know, 36 is the number that's coming back to me,
14 but that would be a ballpark.
15 Q. Isn't it true that there's two parts of the MST
16 program, there's MST continuum and there's this home-based
17 MST?
18 A. Home-based MST is just a service. It's not a
19 program. The MST continuum was a research project.
20 Q. So the home-based MST, is that still ongoing?
21 A. That's correct.
22 Q. So in the consent decree -- or the revised consent
23 decree, we'll call it that, where they had the benchmarks,
24 and I believe this is benchmark 114, that at least 56 youths
25 will be receiving services by July 2001 and it's under
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1 multi-systemic therapy, is that the continuum that's being
2 referenced or is that home-based?
3 A. That's the continuum that's being referenced.
4 Q. So in about August of 2000 is when the MST
5 continuum made its way into the consent decree; would that be
6 about right?
7 A. That's a good question. I don't know. I don't
8 know what the date of that -- if that's the -- if that's
9 dated August of 2000, I think it would be about that time,
10 yeah.
11 Q. I mean, it wasn't in 1999?
12 A. Oh, no, no, no, no.
13 Q. Now, there's a couple things that you stated that I
14 thought I heard you correctly, but let me go back. You said
15 in Philadelphia there is a continua. You made a difference
16 between continua -- a continua project going on. And I think
17 that's just the plural for Philadelphia and Honolulu; is that
18 correct?
19 A. Well, continua refers to both of them. Continuum
20 refers to one of them, yeah.
21 Q. So it's a plural because there's two, correct?
22 A. Right.
23 Q. Now, you said after a two-year setup, the
24 Philadelphia project is now accepting one or two clients; is
25 that correct?
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1 A. Yeah, that was my understanding the last time that
2 I heard, and they have more now.
3 Q. Now, when was this in terms of time frame?
4 A. Well, I think discussions began with Annie E. Casey
5 Foundation about having a continuum a number of years ago and
6 they were going to set it up in Boston. It got to the point
7 where they were ready, that the continuum was completely in
8 place, all of the memorandums of agreement were signed,
9 everybody was on board and prepared and training was going to
10 begin, and my understanding of this is that the governor of
11 Massachusetts line item vetoed everything that the Annie E.
12 Casey Foundation was helping to support, because Boston had
13 agreed to support a certain amount of the continuum, Annie E.
14 Casey was going to come in and support the research part of
15 the continuum, and the governor vetoed it out of that budget.
16 Why? I think there are a number of speculative guesses about
17 it, but I don't know why, but Philadelphia had also come
18 forward and said we would be interested in taking a look at a
19 continuum using MST as the model by which all practitioners
20 worked from, I think, subsequent to the Boston conversations.
21 Q. My question is when?
22 A. I don't know when this conversation started.
23 Q. But when did Philadelphia --
24 A. Oh, Philadelphia opened -- Philadelphia opened up,
25 my understanding, in July of this year.
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1 Q. When you say opened up in July of this year, are
2 you talking about accepting one or two clients?
3 A. Recruiting and accepting, yes, youth and their
4 families.
5 Q. But then you said that you had -- you had
6 benefitted when you set up the MST in Hawaii -- continuum in
7 Hawaii from the two years' worth of work and preparation that
8 they did in Philadelphia.
9 A. That's correct.
10 Q. So that was ongoing in terms of the preparation
11 stage for two years before they finally accepted the one or
12 two clients in July of this year?
13 A. Yeah, in Philadelphia.
14 Q. But you were able to set up the MST and accept 36
15 clients in what period of time?
16 A. It was -- from the time that the idea first came up
17 to -- I think it was to the time that we had those 36 kids, I
18 think 18 months.
19 Q. So if you started in July 1, around there, of 2001,
20 you're saying that the MST concept was being set up for 18
21 months prior to that?
22 A. Wow. Maybe that's not right. The MST first
23 arrived in January of 2000. It was spring of that year that
24 I think the first conversations were held about the idea of a
25 continuum and whether it would be viable here in Hawaii, and
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1 it was -- and I'm using July, but it's really August or
2 September. So if we talk about March of 2000 through
3 September, October of 2001, however many months that is.
4 Q. Around six months?
5 A. No, March of 2000 to August, September of 2001.
6 Q. But my question is from the time you started to
7 accept the students, which is July 1, 2001 is the start date
8 that you've given us, how much time prior to that was the
9 continuum being put into place?
10 A. Oh, those conversations started in the spring of --
11 Q. 2000?
12 A. Of 2000, right, so it would be maybe -- maybe March
13 or April of 2000 to July of 2001 when we really started to
14 go.
15 Q. Now, the concern I have is that you've described
16 the families, they tend to be impoverished, you have a very
17 fragile group that you're servicing, so what happened when
18 this continuum terminated that had -- basically you had a
19 reward system in there, kids were apparently very attached to
20 the servers, the people who were serving them, what happened
21 to these children?
22 A. You know, that's -- that's a good question, and
23 part of it to see how well they do in the future is -- I'm
24 hesitant to say. I hope they do well. I think some of them
25 will be much better for having MST in their lives for
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1 whatever short period it was. I think it's important to
2 recognize that we were like any other service. Over the
3 course of time you don't expect service providers to stay in
4 your life forever. They shouldn't. Kids should at some
5 point in time get better. With many kids maintenance is an
6 outcome, and just keeping them out of a hospital is going to
7 be a good, hard job. With lots of kids, you know, you sort
8 of expect them to need less services over the course of time
9 and --
10 Q. Dr. Donkervoet, I don't mean to cut you off, but my
11 question is this: You've come into their lives. They are
12 obviously difficult children.
13 A. Right.
14 Q. You come into their lives. You say up to a certain
15 extent you've replaced parents with therapists. You've got a
16 reward system put into place. Then you pull out of their
17 lives.
18 A. No, no.
19 Q. What happens -- no, let me finish. So what have
20 you recommended or what is the department going to do to
21 ensure that because we put them into MST and we pulled them
22 out of MST, what's the impact on these students? I mean,
23 what are we going to do to monitor whether we did or the
24 court did more damage to them by putting them into this MST
25 program? What's going to be done to follow up? What's the
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1 longitudinal study that you're going to do or what's in
2 place, if you know?
3 A. Okay. I hear what you're saying, and here's my
4 response: A, we put in reward systems with parents
5 eventually being in charge of those reward systems. We help
6 parents, and a lot of times they start out. Secondly,
7 therapists don't replace families. That is -- that really is
8 a manipulation of what I've been trying to get across here.
9 Therapists don't replace families. We aren't in their lives
10 forever. We aren't planning to be in their lives forever.
11 And families are really what MST is all about, getting
12 families to do a good enough job so the kids don't need to
13 rely on the service system anymore. So the question is have
14 these kids been transitioned effectively, will the next set
15 of providers be able to support them so that they are able to
16 remain in the school setting, will their families get the
17 appropriate kind of services. That's an empirical question,
18 and I'm relatively certain that division is going to be
19 looking at these kids as a carve out of all Felix kids who
20 are all being analyzed to ensure that the services are
21 appropriate.
22 Q. Let me finish my questioning with this. As you sit
23 here today, you don't know what they are going to do?
24 A. I don't.
25 Q. Thank you. That's what I thought, you don't know.
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1 Thank you.
2 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you. I
3 just have a few questions.
4 EXAMINATION
5 BY CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI:
6 Q. You arrived in Hawaii in July 1996?
7 A. That's correct.
8 Q. Have you resided here continuously since then?
9 A. That is correct.
10 Q. You referred to the MST project as a research
11 project.
12 A. That's correct.
13 Q. Whose research project was this?
14 A. I believe that -- well, it's a combination of the
15 Medical University of South Carolina, the Department of
16 Health, and I think UAP, but there was also -- we were
17 connected with UH.
18 Q. What is UAP?
19 A. University of Affiliated Professionals.
20 Q. Is Mr. Henggeler an employee of the Medical
21 University of South Carolina?
22 A. Yes, he is.
23 Q. Was he in charge of the research project from that
24 end?
25 A. Yeah, he's the principal investigator at that end.
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1 Q. Who has an ownership interest in MST?
2 A. I believe -- well, I think the four owners that
3 were mentioned previously, Dr. Henggeler, Dr. Rowland,
4 Dr. Schoenwald, and Mr. Struther.
5 Q. So you have no ownership interest in MST?
6 A. No, I do not.
7 Q. What kind of fees were charged to the state of
8 Hawaii for the use of MST?
9 A. I really -- you know, I don't have the fee
10 schedule. I think there may be something in here about that,
11 but that's something that you could obtain from division.
12 Q. Well, do you know if the fees were -- was it a set
13 fee or was it a cap fee?
14 A. I think MST has set fees for training,
15 consultation, and the follow-up work that they do with all
16 sites.
17 Q. If the research project had proven successful in
18 Hawaii with respect to IDEA kids, what was the potential
19 ramification for the use of MST throughout the United States,
20 just very briefly?
21 A. I would be guessing to say. I don't know that. If
22 it works, I think it's very promising for kids, for families,
23 and for all service systems, if it works.
24 Q. I would assume that the -- at least the four
25 individuals with an ownership interest in MST would profit
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1 from the use of that success?
2 A. I don't know if a nonprofit or a profit, but I
3 would hope so, yeah.
4 Q. I think somebody had asked you about any
5 affiliation that you might have with Dr. Groves, Dr. Behar,
6 and Dr. Schrag. Do you know if any of the four owners that
7 you have identified have any affiliation with Dr. Groves,
8 Dr. Behar, or Dr. Schrag?
9 A. Prior to MST coming to this state, I don't think
10 there was any kind of relationship whatsoever. After having
11 come to this state, they -- I know that they've met to talk
12 about whether the continuum was a viable idea, whether it
13 wasn't, whether the monitor could see it as being something
14 that might be an asset, but those conversations I have not
15 been involved in.
16 Q. Do you know if they had any kind of affiliation or
17 any kind of research together prior to the use of MST in
18 Hawaii?
19 A. I am quite certain that they have done no research
20 together.
21 Q. Was there any kind of discussion or contact on a
22 professional level or a personal level prior to MST being
23 used in Hawaii?
24 A. No, I don't believe there was.
25 Q. Why was MST included as one of the benchmarks?
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1 A. I don't have an answer for that, to be honest with
2 you.
3 Q. Who would have included MST as a benchmark?
4 A. Even that I'm uncertain about. I think those
5 conversations occur at the -- sort of the -- a combination of
6 the monitor's office, Department of Education, Department of
7 Health, but whose idea it was or where it was initiated, I do
8 not know.
9 Q. So you had no idea, even though you were an
10 employee at the health department, that this benchmark was
11 included?
12 A. I found out that it was going to be a benchmark
13 when it was sent to the court, so...
14 Q. You have no idea who sent it to the court?
15 A. Well, it always comes -- I think it always comes
16 through the plaintiff's attorneys or from our AG. There's a
17 standard way in which the revised consent decree goes
18 through. I think it's from our AG.
19 Q. Well, who brought this to the attention of the AG?
20 A. I have no idea. I have no idea.
21 Q. Thank you.
22 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Members, any
23 follow-up questions? First, from special counsel?
24 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA: I do not. Thank
25 you.
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1 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Senator
2 Sakamoto.
3 SENATOR SAKAMOTO: Thank you, Chair.
4 EXAMINATION
5 BY SENATOR SAKAMOTO:
6 Q. The various positions you had with the training
7 institute or with MST or utilization review, what role did
8 you have in watching the budget, determining what costs were
9 expended, and if were not -- programs were costing too much
10 or over budget or not?
11 A. Right. When I was with the -- as the clinical
12 director for division, I was involved in conversations about
13 the budget, but I had more than my fair share of problems
14 that needed addressing on the clinical side of things. So at
15 that point in time, by and large it was the assistant chief
16 there who handled almost all budgetary matters. When I was
17 at the Staff Service Development Institute, ultimately I was
18 accountable for the budget there, and so we tracked very
19 carefully the amount of expenditures to ensure that all
20 parties' initiatives could be met. And then lastly, when I
21 was at the MST both as the -- certainly at Hawaii State
22 Hospital, but no knowledge of the budget. When I was with
23 MST as the coordinator for the state, I certainly was
24 involved in some of the discussions with MST Services, but
25 once I moved to clinical supervisor, I had -- there was an
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1 administrator overseeing both MST programs and I was no
2 longer at all attentive to the allotment of funds, how it was
3 spent, that kind of stuff. That became somebody else's
4 responsibility completely.
5 Q. So you didn't review periodically, monthly or
6 quarterly, even though someone else may have compiled it?
7 A. Someone else compiled, and as a research question,
8 you know, eventually that's somebody else's responsibility to
9 track. My responsibility is to try and keep kids in the
10 community functioning as well as they possibly can, and I
11 know that this is probably a dumb way of looking at it, but
12 as a clinician I'm less concerned about cost as I am about
13 whether or not we're being effective in helping kids do what
14 they need to do. Somebody else's job is cost. They have a
15 whole infrastructure, yeah.
16 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
17 Senator Buen.
18 SENATOR BUEN: Thank you.
19 EXAMINATION
20 BY SENATOR BUEN:
21 Q. Thank you. Back to the accountability for the
22 payment for these service providers that I asked earlier, and
23 CAMHD has, you said, set up clinical standards for every
24 service category?
25 A. Yes.
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1 Q. I want to know how these providers are kept
2 accountable for following these standards? For example, many
3 of these students who are placed in therapeutic foster homes
4 were receiving services which by clinical standards should
5 include the individual, the group, the family, and family
6 therapy as part of the package of services being paid for.
7 Now, these students are also being provided with individual
8 therapy and family therapy in addition by different providers
9 because of various reasons. For example, parents and family
10 were already receiving therapy from another provider and want
11 to continue with that provider. So how is this -- how are
12 they accountable for the -- providers accountable? Do you
13 folks have -- kept an accountability system or how are they
14 accountable?
15 A. Right. The ultimate way that providers are
16 accountable -- and I will say that, you know, providers have
17 really gotten a bad name in this state, and by and large it
18 has been troubling to hear the kinds of questions that sort
19 of say, well, you know, all of them are just money grubbing
20 parasites.
21 Q. I didn't say that.
22 A. Right, I know, but I will also say that, you know,
23 there are times that there's a dosage phenomenon, families
24 get more services than they really need. Then there are
25 other times where families get exactly the right amount of
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1 service. By and large what each service is meant to do can
2 be a very different thing. If you have a child who's
3 experiencing significant post-traumatic stress as a result of
4 some sort of trauma when she was a child --
5 Q. Mr. Donkervoet, I am asking how is CAMHD -- I don't
6 mean for you to go into all of that. I just want to know if,
7 you know, there's an accountability that CAMHD is providing?
8 A. Oh, I didn't realize it was a yes-or-no question.
9 Yes.
10 SENATOR BUEN: Thank you.
11 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
12 Members, any other follow-up questions? Co-Chair Hanabusa.
13 EXAMINATION
14 BY CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA:
15 Q. Can you tell me whether when the MST program was --
16 the continuum was basically phasing out, was there permission
17 sought from the court to remove it as a benchmark?
18 A. I know that we had a number of discussions with the
19 clinical director division about the fact that it was a
20 benchmark, and it had -- it had to in some way be removed,
21 would be my guess. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not responsible
22 for that, but I thought that the rationale that we're just
23 not going to get enough subjects, period, was a pretty strong
24 one.
25 Q. But do you know in fact it was?
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1 A. I do not know that for a fact.
2 Q. You also at one time were the head of the Felix
3 Training Institute?
4 A. That's correct.
5 Q. And that also ceased operation, right?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. And that ceased what year?
8 A. That ceased, I think -- '97 to '99. I think in
9 July of 2000 it completely split.
10 Q. And you were -- I guess you were there prior to
11 moving on to the MST continuum?
12 A. Yeah, that's correct.
13 Q. Now, is there a reason why the Felix Training
14 Institute was either ended, disbanded, or whatever happened
15 to it?
16 A. The departments came to the conclusion that they
17 could handle the respective functions and that a separate
18 agency to ensure training was no longer necessary. Its job
19 had been completed.
20 Q. There is -- you said that there was Title 4(E)
21 funding which was sought and given for the Felix Training
22 Institute?
23 A. I believe that's correct, yes.
24 Q. You know that Lenore Behar has problems in North
25 Carolina because of her use of Title 4(E) funding? You're
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1 aware of that?
2 A. I am aware of that.
3 Q. Did that situation play in any way in the decision
4 to disband the Felix Training Institute, the use of Title
5 4(E) funding?
6 A. Absolutely not. All of that was far after the
7 decisions around the training institute were made.
8 Q. So the training institute was going to close down
9 before -- or as far as you know, before the department had
10 any knowledge of the federal investigation on Ms. Behar?
11 A. I would -- yeah, I would say that's correct.
12 Q. Thank you.
13 A. As far as I'm aware.
14 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
15 Vice-Chair Kokubun.
16 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN: My questions have
17 been answered. Thank you.
18 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: I just have a
19 couple of follow-up questions.
20 EXAMINATION
21 BY CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI:
22 Q. Who at the DOH was in charge of the research
23 project?
24 A. Who in the Department of Health?
25 Q. Yes.
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1 A. I believe Terry Lee was the principal investigator
2 for a short while, Steve Haynes for a while, and that's the
3 best I can do.
4 Q. What about at UAP?
5 A. At UAP I believe it was Steve Haynes, which is why
6 I'm having a difficult time coming up with who would be the
7 most recent PI.
8 Q. Are you familiar with the benchmarks?
9 A. Yes, some of them. Well, not memorized certainly.
10 Q. In part the benchmarks that are to be met in order
11 for us to reach compliance.
12 A. Right.
13 Q. Why would an experimental project be a benchmark?
14 A. I don't have an answer for that. That's a good
15 question.
16 Q. Do you know who would know?
17 A. Possibly the chief at Child and Adolescent Mental
18 Health Division and possibly Mary Brogan.
19 Q. Okay, thank you very much.
20 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Members, any
21 other follow-up questions? If not, Dr. Donkervoet, thank you
22 very much for your testimony today.
23 Members, Co-Chair would like to move that we
24 convene in executive session for the purpose of discussing
25 witness testimony, obtaining an overview of the investigation
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1 from our special counsel, and to discuss the issuance of
2 further subpoenas, and also to discuss the motion to quash
3 the subpoena of Judy Schrag that was just filed a couple of
4 days ago in federal court. Is there any discussion on the
5 motion? If not, we'll take a roll call vote.
6 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Co-Chair Saiki?
7 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Yes.
8 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Vice-Chair
9 Kokubun?
10 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN: Aye.
11 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Vice-Chair Oshiro?
12 VICE-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE OSHIRO: Aye.
13 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Senator Buen?
14 SENATOR BUEN: Aye.
15 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
16 Ito?
17 REPRESENTATIVE ITO: Aye.
18 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
19 Kawakami?
20 REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI: Aye.
21 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
22 Leong?
23 REPRESENTATIVE LEONG: Aye.
24 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Representative
25 Marumoto?
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1 REPRESENTATIVE MARUMOTO: Aye.
2 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Senator Sakamoto?
3 SENATOR SAKAMOTO: Aye.
4 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Senator Slom?
5 SENATOR SLOM: Aye.
6 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: And Co-Chair.
7 Motion is carried.
8 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you,
9 Members. We will recess for the purpose of convening in
10 executive session in room 329 and we will reconvene our
11 public hearing in one hour at 1:10. Recess.
12 (Recess taken.)
13 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Members, we are
14 reconvened. At this time I'd like to call forward Mr. Edwin
15 Koyama.
16 THE WITNESS: Good afternoon.
17 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Good afternoon,
18 Mr. Koyama. Thank you for appearing here. Mr. Koyama, as
19 you know, you've been subpoenaed and I'm now to place you
20 under oath. So, Mr. Koyama, do you solemnly swear or affirm
21 that the testimony you're about to give will be the truth,
22 the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
23 MR. KOYAMA: I do.
24 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Thank you very
25 much.
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1 Members, we'll follow our usual process. We'll
2 begin with Mr. Kawashima.
3 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA: Thank you, Madam
4 Chair.
5 EXAMINATION
6 BY SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA:
7 Q. Please state your name and business address, sir.
8 A. Yes. My name is Edwin Koyama, and my business
9 address is 3645 Waialae Avenue, Building B, Room 302,
10 Honolulu, Hawaii 96816.
11 Q. And that is the address of the Department of
12 Education, sir?
13 A. That is the address of my office, which happens to
14 be at a location that is outside of the main office of the
15 Department of Education.
16 Q. You are employed by the Department of Education,
17 however?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. What is your position with the department, sir?
20 A. The internal auditor.
21 Q. And how long have you served in that capacity?
22 A. Since November of 1994.
23 Q. Now, sir, before I go on, I'd like to get some
24 background information from you. Would you tell us what your
25 education -- formal educational background has been after
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1 secondary school?
2 A. Yes. I have a bachelor's degree in accounting from
3 the University of Southern California and a master's in
4 business administration at the University of Southern
5 California as well.
6 Q. And when were these degrees obtained, sir?
7 A. The bachelor's degree was in 1977 and the master's
8 was in 1990.
9 Q. Do you hold a CPA, sir?
10 A. Yes. Not in public practice.
11 Q. When did you obtain that CPA license?
12 A. That would have been in 1977 as well.
13 Q. How about your work history, sir, can you tell us
14 where you've worked, different places you've worked up until
15 now?
16 A. Sure. Let's see. For about three and a half years
17 I was with the CPA firm of -- at the time it was Ernst &
18 Ernst. Now it has merged into -- well, several merges --
19 into Ernst & Young, and after that I was employed by
20 Dillingham Corporation in various accounting responsibilities
21 and accounting management responsibilities.
22 Q. For how long, sir?
23 A. That was until, let's see, 1985, I believe, if I
24 recall correctly.
25 Q. And then what happened in 1985?
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1 A. Dillingham Corporation was going through a leverage
2 buy-out and selling off its subsidiaries, and so one of the
3 subsidiaries I was working was in the marine industry which
4 was being sold off, and so I had to seek other employment. I
5 should mention that during that time I was transferred to the
6 mainland and was working in California at that time.
7 Q. Was it Young Brothers you were associated with?
8 A. Let's see. Tug and barge, I should say, Dillingham
9 Tug & Barge.
10 Q. Dillingham Tug & Barge, all right. When did you
11 come to the state of Hawaii, then?
12 A. Excuse me, if I could correct that statement.
13 Q. Sure.
14 A. Pacific Tow Boat & Salvage was the actual
15 subsidiary name. I'm sorry.
16 Q. No problem. When did you start with the state,
17 sir, state of Hawaii?
18 A. That was in -- well, 1994 with the Department of
19 Education.
20 Q. So that was your first employment position with the
21 state of Hawaii --
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. -- was with the Department of Education as its
24 internal auditor in November of 1994?
25 A. Yes.
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1 Q. And you have been -- you have served continuously
2 in that position up until today?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. Now, would you tell us what your duties are as
5 internal auditor?
6 A. Yes. I'm responsible for working on financial
7 audits of schools and offices within the Department of
8 Education. Does that answer your question?
9 Q. Well, I'll ask you some more questions to expand on
10 it if we need to. Your office -- I assume you have staff
11 with you?
12 A. No.
13 Q. You are a one-person office?
14 A. Yes, with no clerical help, no secretarial help, no
15 additional auditors for a -- for the size of budget of the
16 Department of Education that we have.
17 Q. That sounds like some kind of punishment,
18 Mr. Koyama. Well, you've generated some fairly extensive
19 reports, though. Do you process them yourself?
20 A. Yes, and type them.
21 Q. And you do all your investigation yourself?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. So to whom do you report, Mr. Koyama?
24 A. I report to the superintendent's office of the
25 Department of Education, logistically the deputy
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1 superintendent.
2 Q. I see. Do you report at all to the Board of
3 Education?
4 A. We do report information to the Board of Education,
5 yes. Does that answer your question?
6 Q. That's fine. Let me ask it this way, sir. What is
7 the mechanism that establishes your office, what rule or
8 regulation or statute? How is your office established such
9 that they would have a person like you fulfilling those
10 obligations and duties?
11 A. I'm not exactly sure. My understanding is that
12 there's no specific statute per se that covers my office.
13 Q. All right. But then how do you decide -- well,
14 strike that.
15 I understand your title, but you earlier provided
16 us with a copy of an internal financial audit that you did
17 relating to the Felix response plan, did you not?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. And you completed that report in its entirety by
20 yourself?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. And, for example, a report like that, I notice
23 looking at it -- you've termed it an engagement. That's a
24 term of art in the accounting area, is it not?
25 A. Yes.
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1 Q. So that the type of investigations and evaluations
2 that you do that ultimately end up in a report, what are
3 they? Are they audits? Are they engagements? If there's
4 one area of -- one term, what is the term I'm thinking of
5 even less than an engagement? I'm not suggesting an
6 engagement is not good. I'm just saying there's some other
7 study that's less than that in terms of its requirements.
8 What am I talking about?
9 A. Yes. I believe you're referring to what's called
10 an attestation.
11 Q. Or review maybe?
12 A. Yes, yes. There are various types of --
13 Q. Do you actually do audits, using it as a term of
14 art as CPAs use it, or do you do engagements usually?
15 A. Let me think about that.
16 Q. You can explain it any way you'd like.
17 A. I would say that the general public would interpret
18 my services as audit services. However, the technical
19 terminology in the industry is very specific.
20 Q. Why is it that it's specific as to it being an
21 engagement as opposed to the lay understanding of an audit?
22 A. Well, there are different standards that apply that
23 have been defined by either the government accounting office
24 or the American Institute of CPAs that apply to the various
25 types of audit services, recognizing that there are different
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1 types of needs that accountants or auditors need to serve.
2 Q. Do you actually apply generally accepted government
3 auditing standards to your work?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Is that what you did in this case?
6 A. Yes, and I need to qualify that or explain that a
7 little further in that in the technical terminology for the
8 industry, this particular item is referred to as an agreed
9 upon procedures engagement whereby -- in simple terms it
10 means my boss and I discussed and agreed upon what needed to
11 be done and those procedures were done and completed.
12 Q. Do you conduct audits or engagements, using the
13 terms loosely, where there is no agreed upon procedure?
14 A. There may be occasion for that, yes.
15 Q. Are there such audits or engagements that you do
16 that are required as a duty of your job? In other words, a
17 yearly or semi-annual or biannual audit of the department?
18 Are there such requirements for you?
19 A. Well, I believe you're referring to the annual
20 audits of the entire Department of Education, and those I do
21 serve in an assist role. For example, we engage services of
22 outside CPA firms to do the federal single audit of the
23 entire Department of Education, and I assist in that role.
24 Q. I see. But otherwise, there are no other standard
25 audits or engagements that you conduct on a yearly basis or
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1 semi-annual basis or whatever it might be as a regular part
2 of your job?
3 A. That is correct.
4 Q. So that what happens is that you do get these
5 assignments usually from the superintendent to conduct
6 certain types of audits and engagements?
7 A. Well, the superintendent's office, and as I
8 mentioned earlier, logistically the deputy superintendent.
9 Q. You work directly with Ms. -- who was at that time
10 deputy, Ms. Hamamoto?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. And is that who you worked with on this
13 engagement -- agreed upon procedures engagement?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. So what is your understanding as to why this
16 assignment came about? Why and how, maybe I should say?
17 A. Let's see. My understanding is that the deputy
18 superintendent was concerned about whether expenditures that
19 were made regarding the Felix response plan that were
20 originally intended to be budgeted were in effect expended in
21 accordance with what we said we were going to do, and with
22 that concern this assignment was given.
23 Q. Your June 8th memo to Superintendent LeMahieu,
24 Subject: Internal financial audit: Felix response plan, it
25 specifically sets forth there in the second paragraph that
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1 the purpose of the audit was to determine whether the Felix
2 response plan legislative emergency appropriation has been
3 expended in accordance with the program objectives and
4 authorized initial budget justification. That really was
5 what your job was --
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. -- in this case?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. Now, obviously, as it says, you were to look at
10 whether or not program objectives were followed, right, one
11 of the things?
12 A. Well, not necessarily to interpret the program
13 itself, but as far as fiscal documentation had shown what
14 expenditures were made in relation to what was documented as
15 budgeted expenditures.
16 Q. I understand. Am I to understand, then,
17 Mr. Koyama, what you did in this case, this financial audit,
18 was to review various documents, statements, things of that
19 nature, not necessarily interview anyone?
20 A. It did include interviews as well.
21 Q. Interviews of whom?
22 A. Various department personnel.
23 Q. And was there a procedure or was there a reason why
24 you interviewed one person and not another?
25 A. Only in relation to the subject matter that I was
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1 assigned to, and that would be -- included in the report are
2 the 12 priorities of the Felix response plan.
3 Q. I see. Did you normally -- did you try as the
4 standard practice to record in the report where you actually
5 interviewed someone or not? I'm not suggesting that you
6 should have, but, for example, if you did interview someone
7 relating to Columbus Educational Services, did you attempt to
8 place within that report some reference to that interview and
9 the fact that it was -- that it was had?
10 A. I would say it would depend on the circumstance,
11 and I use my judgment in certain instances.
12 Q. Sure. Now, in this case, Mr. Koyama, in addition
13 to making that comparison to see whether or not the
14 appropriations had been expended in accordance with the
15 program objectives, all right?
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. Was part of your job to determine if in fact the
18 emergency appropriations had been expended in its entirety?
19 A. No. I should clarify that the time frame of this
20 engagement was for a nine-month period, and so the fiscal
21 year had not yet been completed, and therefore it was a
22 snapshot at a point in time and only conclusions could be
23 drawn based on that data alone.
24 Q. But these types of audits are typically snapshots
25 of a point in time, are they not?
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1 A. Yes.
2 Q. But in this case, understanding that you did do it
3 for a nine-month period ending March 31st of this year, do
4 you know as you sit here today as of June 30th of this year
5 whether the amounts remaining to be spent from those
6 emergency appropriations are the same or less or what?
7 A. I'm sorry, could you repeat your question?
8 Q. Yeah. I understand part of your finding was there
9 was 17 million that had been yet unexpended?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. 17 million, I use that very roughly.
12 A. Well, actually, 12 million as of March.
13 Q. As of March 31st?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Right. As of the end of the fiscal year, which
16 would have been June 30th of this year, do you know how much,
17 if any, was remaining from the total amount of the emergency
18 appropriations of I believe almost $28 million?
19 A. Well, that information was not part of this audit,
20 so --
21 Q. I understand. I understand that's the case, sir,
22 but as the internal auditor, you must have some idea, right,
23 as to whether or not any of those amounts are remaining to be
24 spent, in other words, have not been spent?
25 A. I have not been assigned to do that, so I did not
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1 have that information.
2 Q. I understand. Do you have an understanding,
3 Mr. Koyama, as you sit here today -- I won't hold you to a
4 specific amount, but do you have an understanding as to how
5 much was not expended of the total amount of emergency
6 appropriations that were given by the legislature?
7 A. Could you repeat the question? I'm sorry.
8 Q. Yeah. Do you know, sir -- do you have an
9 understanding as to whether or not the entire amount of the
10 emergency appropriations had been expended, or I believe the
11 term is encumbered, by June 30th, 2001?
12 A. No, I do not.
13 Q. You have no idea?
14 A. No.
15 Q. Now, as of the date of your audit, though, 17
16 million has not been expended, right?
17 A. I believe it's 12 million.
18 Q. I'm sorry, 12 million. A little bit off. I may be
19 incorrect, sir, but you use the term for-funded, right?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. I've seen the term emergency appropriations also
22 used.
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. My understanding of what the emergency
25 appropriations are, are a request for funds -- funding for
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1 amounts that have already been spent. Do you understand the
2 term in that way or not?
3 A. I am not involved --
4 Q. Spent or committed, maybe I should say, spent or
5 committed. Do you understand that --
6 A. I would say -- well, I'm not the budget expert in
7 the department, but I would say that it would be planned.
8 The term I would use is planned to be spent.
9 Q. Planned. Well, certainly if it was spent, it would
10 come within that category, if it had already been spent but
11 it had not been funded in any fashioned previously and you
12 needed to pay for it, that would come under this category
13 emergency appropriations, wouldn't it?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. And if it's committed, for example, certainly would
16 come under this term --
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. -- emergency appropriations, right?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Committed, encumbered, is that the same thing to
21 you?
22 A. I would say so. I'm not exactly sure.
23 Q. I don't know technically whether or not it is, but
24 let's assume it is. So what else would be within this
25 category of emergency appropriations, then, other than
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1 funded, that had already been spent for which funding is
2 needed and funds that have been committed or encumbered
3 already? Anything else that would come under that category
4 of funds as you understand the term?
5 A. I don't have any additional information to add.
6 Q. You don't have any understanding of that?
7 A. Only as was included in the scope of this audit,
8 yes.
9 Q. Well, obviously within the scope of this audit,
10 Mr. Koyama, money out of the total amount that was
11 appropriated, money was still there to be spent, right?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. $12 million?
14 A. Yes, uh-huh.
15 Q. So obviously if we were to -- if we were to define
16 emergency appropriations as only for those funds that have
17 already been spent, certainly something is wrong here, right,
18 because there was money left to be spent and if the money had
19 already been spent, the money would have gone out to pay for
20 it? So obviously the way it is looked at by the Department
21 of Education perhaps might be different than perhaps the
22 legislature looks at that term. Do you agree with that
23 statement?
24 A. Well, my interpretation would be that the -- or my
25 understanding, I should say, is that the department had
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1 planned to spend X amount of dollars, and perhaps due to
2 timing of when those expenditures actually could have been
3 made, there may have been some differences in amounts of
4 actual expenditures versus when they had originally been
5 so-called committed to be spent.
6 Q. I understand, and again, I may not be asking the
7 right person this question, Mr. Koyama, but let me ask it and
8 then perhaps we'll move on. When you say the department had
9 planned something, is there some level, some standard that is
10 applied to that planning? In other words, what reasonably
11 might be planned, what after doing some type of investigation
12 you expect to spend that money -- your plan is to spend that
13 money within a three-month, six-month period, whatever it
14 might be, what standards are applied to that term plan,
15 planning to be spent when the department decides they are
16 going to ask for this amount of money because they are
17 planning to spend it? You may not know. I'm asking do you
18 know. You may -- that may be a question I should ask someone
19 else, but I'm asking you if you know, sir.
20 A. I don't know.
21 Q. Now, your audit, though, has areas what you call
22 findings, right?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. And these are findings of areas of concern; is that
25 correct?
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1 A. Yes.
2 Q. And these are findings of areas of concern where
3 there are discrepancies or problems; would that be correct?
4 A. Yes, that's correct.
5 Q. And would it be fair to say, then, that your
6 findings are of areas that need to be corrected?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. And you make recommendations, in fact, as to how
9 these areas of findings should be corrected?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. I notice that you did -- you did issue a draft
12 report first and then you brought to us the final report?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. And I believe they are virtually the same?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. Is it because there were no comments that were
17 given after the draft was circulated such that any changes
18 were made to the draft?
19 A. Well, the procedure that we follow is that after
20 these -- the audit report is issued, then a corrective action
21 plan is formulated and implemented.
22 Q. I'm talking between the draft report and the final.
23 The draft report was issued for comment, I believe, by a
24 number of people?
25 A. Yes, that's correct, yes.
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1 Q. And the fact that the final report was virtually
2 identical to the draft report, would that suggest that there
3 were no comments of consequence that came back from the
4 people on the circulation list such that you thought that you
5 ought to amend the report in any way?
6 A. Let's see. That was the intention, and that is
7 correct as far as I understand. There is one instance that I
8 need to clarify in the report that normally would go through
9 an amendment, but we -- I would expect that that issue would
10 be addressed in a subsequent -- in the corrective action
11 plan.
12 Q. I see. Is the corrective action plan being worked
13 upon?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. And when would that -- when is the anticipated date
16 of completion of that corrective action plan?
17 A. Let's see. I cannot exactly state the time, but I
18 understand that the time frame was targeted for November,
19 next month.
20 Q. November 1st?
21 A. No, not the 1st. Actually, a briefing to the Board
22 of Education by one of the board meetings in November.
23 Q. I see. I notice that the draft report and the
24 final report was provided to the Board of Education.
25 A. Yes, that's correct.
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1 Q. Is that a normal procedure for these types of
2 reports to be submitted to the Board of Education?
3 A. I'm sorry, the draft was not.
4 Q. I'm sorry.
5 A. Only the final report was issued to the Board of
6 Education.
7 Q. Okay. The draft report was not submitted to the
8 board?
9 A. Right, not that I can recall.
10 Q. Is there any reason why it was not?
11 A. Well, the reason is the purpose -- or the
12 engagement was with the office of the superintendent and not
13 the Board of Education.
14 Q. I see. And is it also because you weren't seeking
15 comment from the board as to the draft report probably?
16 A. Well, the matters included in the scope of the
17 audit, as I interpreted it, did not involve board action.
18 Q. All right. Now, am I to understand that about half
19 of the for-funded money that was appropriated -- about half
20 of it had been used by -- a little over half by March 31st of
21 this year; is that correct?
22 A. Yes, that's correct.
23 Q. And did your report encompass a study as to whether
24 or not the department had an anticipated date of spending all
25 of the remainder, if they did spend it all?
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1 A. The report did not have -- include that
2 information.
3 Q. Now, you had 38 findings --
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. -- did you not?
6 By the way, have you -- let me ask it this way.
7 When was the last audit, engagement, review that you've done
8 for the department prior to this one?
9 A. Let's see. I can't exactly, but I would say about
10 a month ago.
11 Q. And when type of audit -- what type of
12 investigation was that? How would you characterize it?
13 A. Let's see. Oh, that particular engagement?
14 Q. Yes.
15 A. Investigation of a particular school.
16 Q. I see. Is it a confidential matter, sir?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. How about audits of this nature, though, of this
19 size and nature as you did in this case relating to the Felix
20 response plan, when was the last time you did an audit of
21 that size?
22 A. I do not recall.
23 Q. Long time ago?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Are your assignments mostly assignments such as you
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1 described where you would go in and audit one school for a
2 specific reason or reasons, the normal work that you do?
3 A. Well, as a practical matter that has happened, yes.
4 Q. So that how do you mostly occupy your time, then,
5 sir, in terms of the work you do in your job? I don't mean
6 day to day, certainly, but what other types of work do you do
7 besides auditing a certain school, for example, or doing a
8 fairly large audit like this?
9 A. There are other tasks. For example, we are -- the
10 Department of Education is audited by the audit division of
11 DAGS, Department of Accounting and General Services. By
12 statute they are required to audit what we call the local
13 school funds at each school, and with that responsibility I
14 am somewhat of a liaison with that area to coordinate the
15 various audits of schools as well for the local school fund
16 portion.
17 Q. I see. In any case, an audit of this magnitude
18 we're talking about on the Felix response plan, you had not
19 done for some time now?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. Have you done one since you started with the
22 department in your position?
23 A. I don't recall every audit that I've done. I may
24 have. I'm not exactly sure.
25 Q. How long did -- how long did it take you to
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1 complete the draft report, all the work that you did to get
2 to the point of completing the draft report?
3 A. Approximately, let's see, two months.
4 Q. So you started on the assignment in April of this
5 year?
6 A. Yes, that's correct.
7 Q. Now, there were some specific findings, if I might
8 ask you some questions about.
9 A. Sure.
10 Q. Finding number one, budget communication process.
11 You stated that the budget communication process must be
12 improved and that budgetary input from the field is
13 necessary. What were you referring to there, sir?
14 A. Let's see. The budget process is a very complex
15 one in the department requiring a multitude of procedures
16 that have to occur in order to develop and implement the
17 budget, and as I had conducted the field work of the audit, I
18 had gotten feedback from the field, meaning in this case
19 program managers of the Felix response plan or others, I
20 don't recall exactly those at this time, but the feedback was
21 that certain budget restrictions were made but the field did
22 not know about it and so monies perhaps may have been
23 expended that were inconsistent with the original budget
24 objectives, and so the comment was, well, why didn't they
25 tell us in the first place. That type of comment.
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1 Q. Communication issue?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. And you received these comments from the people in
4 the field?
5 A. Yes, certain individuals.
6 Q. How did you solicit those comments?
7 A. By -- it came across due to the field work that I
8 did on each particular response plan section.
9 Q. Section. There are a number of sections?
10 A. By first compiling the numbers and then looking at
11 them and conferring with the program managers of each
12 response plan priority.
13 Q. Now, I'm not going through all of them, sir, your
14 findings, but finding number two was lack of effective Felix
15 response plan fiscal management tool/reports.
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. What were you referring to there, sir?
18 A. I think it's also explained a little further on
19 page 3, which is the executive summary.
20 Q. Okay. Perhaps you can read that for us.
21 A. Yes, it's under the systems issues paragraph. "The
22 department's Felix response plan program managers have
23 insufficient tools to fiscally manage their operations. Data
24 is currently seriously fragmented among several areas of the
25 department, budget, personnel, accounting, programs,
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1 districts, and schools. For this audit alone, the majority
2 of time spent on the audit was merely in compiling the data
3 in an understandable financial format.
4 "Therefore, the department must develop a
5 comprehensive Felix financial report which extracts and
6 compiles data from programs, budget, personnel, payroll,
7 accounting, districts, and schools in an understandable
8 format. With these financial reports, the program managers
9 will be able to review the data in a timely manner and
10 identify any unusual or incorrect transactions that require
11 investigation or correction. Also, the program managers will
12 be able to monitor personnel positions to ensure that they
13 are properly accounted for and will be able to monitor
14 expenditures in relation to budgeted line items."
15 Q. So apparently, then -- well, if your recommendation
16 was to be implemented, the data would be compiled in separate
17 categories, such as personnel, for example, payroll, for
18 example, programs, for example, so that one could segregate
19 out these areas if one wanted to and see how much was spent
20 for Felix in that category?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. And what you're saying is that right now, today, as
23 we sit here today, that cannot be done?
24 A. That's not what I'm saying.
25 Q. Then what are you saying?
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1 A. That the data exists and it merely exists in many
2 places.
3 Q. All right. I see. So what you're saying is that
4 to do what I'm asking, to segregate them out and get the
5 categories -- get the amount that was spent on Felix in a
6 specific category, one would have to go to different places
7 to obtain it?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. In other words, it would be a lot more time
10 consuming than if a program were to be implemented such as
11 you recommend?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. Do you know why, Mr. Koyama, up to this point in
14 time, 2001, after the Felix consent decree had been signed,
15 agreed upon, and filed in federal court, oh, seven years ago,
16 perhaps, why only now this is being done?
17 A. I really cannot say. I would be speculating at
18 this point.
19 Q. Now, what you're saying, though, is that your
20 recommendation that you develop this comprehensive Felix
21 financial report, albeit somewhat time consuming, can be done
22 and is it your opinion it can be done by the end of the year,
23 this year, calendar, calendar year?
24 A. It would be very difficult to accomplish.
25 Q. What's a reasonable -- I won't hold you to that
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1 necessarily, but what would be a reasonable time frame to
2 achieve that, to complete that assignment, to put together
3 this financial report as you recommend?
4 A. I guess it would depend on the degree of
5 sophistication that one is expecting from it. As an example,
6 it took me approximately two months to compile this data.
7 Q. You compiled a lot of data, though.
8 A. Yes. And it was done in a manual extraction
9 method, and so if one were to manually extract the data for
10 December 31st of 2001, yes, perhaps it could be done. If it
11 were expected to be done in a sophisticated computer program,
12 that may take longer.
13 Q. What you're saying is it hasn't been decided yet
14 what type of report it's going to be, how sophisticated it's
15 going to be, and things of that nature?
16 A. And what the needs are at the program level and
17 fiscal management level.
18 Q. Now, you also have a finding that there was a lack
19 of fiscal management oversight.
20 A. Yes, that's correct.
21 Q. Finding number three now, and you say there is no
22 overall area in the department that analyzes Felix response
23 plan funds in a budget to actual expenditure comparison?
24 A. That's correct.
25 Q. There was no mechanism whereby on an item in the
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1 Felix response plan -- you had an item there as to being
2 budgeted, there was no comparison to how much was actually
3 spent?
4 A. That's not what I'm saying.
5 Q. All right. What are you saying, sir?
6 A. That there is no -- there are no individuals in the
7 department who are specifically assigned to do this type of
8 analysis for the Felix response plan per se and -- let's see,
9 I can't remember what you had asked earlier.
10 Q. Let me ask it this way, sir. You suggested that
11 actually three special assistants be hired, retained,
12 utilized to support this area?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. Do you see that? Are these three new hires that
15 you're talking about?
16 A. Which page are you looking at?
17 Q. Page 7.
18 A. Oh, page 7 and 8.
19 Q. 7 and 8, right.
20 A. And your question was?
21 Q. Is your recommendation that three new hires be
22 brought on board to do the work that you recommend for this
23 finding number three?
24 A. Well, I'm not recommending specific numbers of
25 positions per se, as far as I recall.
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1 Q. I see. I could be wrong. I thought I saw that you
2 had recommended one Felix response plan financial analysis
3 section, and number two a Felix response plan auditor
4 section, and included within the Felix response plan
5 priority, number 12, are three special assistants to support
6 the Felix response plan. I'm just wondering if these two
7 areas are related to each other?
8 A. They are not.
9 Q. All right. I see. Now, what you suggest here,
10 though, in terms of being able to make that budget to actual
11 expenditure comparison, could that not be built into one of
12 the reports that you will agree upon as part of the
13 corrective plan, I think is the term you used?
14 A. Yes. You are referring to two different things.
15 One is --
16 Q. I'm sorry. I apologize. Explain that to me.
17 A. One is the data required in a format that's
18 understandable and usable, and the second step is dedicated
19 persons who are analyzing the data, and so it's two parts to
20 that -- answer that question, you see.
21 Q. I see. Now, but either way, can that be built into
22 a report that you can craft along with the other reports that
23 you recommended?
24 A. The budget to actual comparison, the data can be.
25 It's just if no one is doing anything with that data, the
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1 usefulness is not there.
2 Q. I understand. I understand. All right. Now, you
3 also have a finding number five, allocations versus
4 allotments. And you say in part there are currently no
5 financial reports which compare budget allocations to
6 allotments so that, quotes, unallotted, end quotes, funds are
7 identified. What do you mean there, sir? Will you explain
8 to us the meaning of those two terms, allocations and
9 allotments?
10 A. Yes. I'm also speaking for the budget office of
11 our department, but my understanding is that when
12 appropriations are given to the department, the department's
13 budget office creates allocations to various areas in the
14 department. Once those areas receive the budget allocations,
15 then they are required to produce -- or to prepare
16 expenditure plans, meaning how they intend to spend the
17 funds, and those -- that data needs to be inputted into our
18 what we call the financial management system or FMS system,
19 and when those expenditure items are inputted, those become
20 what we call allotments, and so the concern is that if the
21 allotments do not match the allocation, then there is risk of
22 missing some dollars somewhere.
23 Q. Fall between the crack?
24 A. Yes, possibly.
25 Q. Why would that be? There may be a ton of reasons
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1 why, but why typically would you have a situation where there
2 would be a discrepancy between the allotments and the -- I'm
3 sorry, the allocation and the allotment?
4 A. Occasionally there are situations in which the area
5 that is inputting the expenditure plan may have incorrectly
6 understood what the allocation total was, or in other cases,
7 in past history of course, the department has had to restrict
8 budget funds and therefore there may be some differences in
9 what the field has in terms of budgeted dollars.
10 Q. But in those cases, though, where they are
11 restricting funds, one would know the fact that there would
12 be a difference, therefore, between the allocation and the
13 allotment?
14 A. One would know if -- however, my point here is that
15 there should be a regularly available report that would
16 monitor this situation such that nothing could fall through
17 the cracks.
18 Q. All right. Again, though, it appears that this can
19 be built into some type of financial report, could it not?
20 A. Yes, it could.
21 Q. You mentioned extraneous payroll charges. I think
22 you suggest that the integrated special ed database had some
23 overstated expenses or expenditures?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. And how did that occur, sir?
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1 A. In those cases, I understand that the payroll costs
2 for those particular line items had been misaccounted for.
3 Q. I see. Do you know why they were misaccounted for?
4 A. I don't recall.
5 Q. Did you actually identify the reason?
6 A. That information is in the supporting documentation
7 for my audit, and I don't have it with me.
8 Q. I see. Now, I'm looking at finding number 10,
9 laptop computers issued to vacant student service
10 coordinators.
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Apparently the department purchased laptop
13 computers for vacant positions for 20 schools and eight
14 charter schools for the student service coordinators in those
15 schools; is that correct?
16 A. That is one area -- that particular item and
17 another one subsequent to that is what I was referring to
18 earlier that normally would go through an amendment.
19 Q. Number 15?
20 A. Number?
21 Q. I think finding 15 might be the one you're
22 referring to?
23 A. Yes. The reason is that although this draft had
24 been distributed for comment and no comments of substance had
25 been returned, I had -- after I issued the audit I found out
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1 that there is a definition of vacancy that needs to be
2 clarified, and that is that in our personnel system positions
3 are defined as vacant, particularly in these particular
4 positions -- for example, on page 15, was it, item 15?
5 Q. Item 15.
6 A. Finding 15, vacancy of a special education teacher
7 is defined because we do not have a certified person in those
8 positions. However -- or I should say a certified department
9 employee in those positions. However, subsequent to the
10 audit I had found that there are substitute teachers who are
11 filling in for those vacancies and there are contracted
12 employees that are also in those positions so that there are
13 bodies there, and so that is not consistent with the finding
14 as originally documented.
15 Q. Are you talking about, Mr. Koyama, personnel
16 employed by Columbus Educational Services?
17 A. In this case, for special education teachers, I
18 believe so.
19 Q. Yes. So what you're saying is your findings in --
20 your findings number 10 and number 15 will probably go
21 through an amendment because your findings were not totally
22 correct?
23 A. Yes. However, the concept still holds in that we
24 need to control the computer equipment that has been
25 purchased and issued.
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1 Q. You first -- in the analysis that you did, it
2 appears that laptop computers had been purchased for vacant
3 positions, first of all?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Then you subsequently learned that while some of
6 these positions may not be vacant, in fact they might be
7 filled, but filled by personnel who do not meet the full
8 requirements of the Department of Education?
9 A. Or contracted out too.
10 Q. Well, contracted out, but --
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. -- because of other reasons, there were employees,
13 although these employees did not fulfill the total
14 requirements needed by the department, right?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. Do you know how many -- what the discrepancy is
17 between the number of computers -- strike that.
18 Let me ask it this way. Are there still -- even
19 though you count those employees, whatever you might call
20 them, exempt employees, whatever you might call them, that
21 were hired that you were not aware of, if we take them into
22 account, are there still computers that were purchased where
23 you have a vacant position and not a person filling that
24 position so essentially that laptop computer will remain
25 unused?
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1 A. I don't exactly know, but I would say perhaps, yes.
2 Q. In all likelihood there are such positions, are
3 there not?
4 A. However, the magnitude of my finding would possibly
5 be substantially lower.
6 Q. But obviously there will be vacant positions for
7 which laptop computers were purchased for student service
8 coordinators and special ed teachers?
9 A. Possibly.
10 Q. In all likelihood there will be such situations?
11 A. I would say so possibly, but the -- I would
12 speculate that the impact may be substantially lower.
13 Q. Perhaps, perhaps, but we're not asking you to
14 speculate. You don't have to speculate. Now, why would that
15 be, though? Why would you have a laptop worth thousands of
16 dollars being purchased for someone who is not there?
17 A. Well, that is the question that is raised in my
18 audit.
19 Q. I see. You have the same question?
20 A. Yes.
21 Q. I see. Have you obtained an answer to that
22 question yet?
23 A. I believe that will be addressed and resolved in
24 our corrective action plan.
25 Q. I understand that, but do you have an
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1 understanding -- I assume you've discussed this matter with
2 department personnel, have you not?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. High administration personnel?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. And have you been given an explanation or have an
7 understanding as to why computers are purchased for vacant
8 positions, assuming that there will be a number of them that
9 will remain vacant even after --
10 A. We have had discussions, but I don't have anything
11 concrete to offer at this time.
12 Q. All right. You also, therefore, had concerns about
13 Columbus Educational Services, did you not?
14 A. Yes, that's correct.
15 Q. 18, I think, sir.
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. And am I correct that you had performance concerns
18 for Columbus Educational Services and concerns regarding the
19 quality of the candidates that were being hired?
20 A. That was -- actually I discovered a typographical
21 error in the report.
22 Q. Where is that, sir? What page?
23 A. Page 19.
24 Q. Okay.
25 A. Since I type these reports myself. On page 19 I'm
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1 referring to the quantity of candidates, not the quality.
2 Q. Oh, I see. Little bit different. In other words,
3 the quantity of candidates not being anywhere near what had
4 been promised by Columbus?
5 A. That's correct.
6 Q. What had been promised by Columbus?
7 A. Well, as of the audit date -- well, as you know,
8 the contract as originally drafted had an expectation as of
9 the audit date of March 31st of 200 employees.
10 Q. Is that the contract that anticipated $100 million
11 of expenditure over two years?
12 A. I believe so, the original contract as drafted.
13 Then it went through a revision in January 2001 and that
14 expectation was reduced to 50 hires.
15 Q. 50 hires?
16 A. As of March 31st, my audit date.
17 Q. Dropped by 75 percent?
18 A. Yes, and then the -- in actual statistics Columbus
19 was only able to hire 23 as of March 31st, the audit date.
20 Q. So you didn't do a qualitative review of the
21 candidates, did you?
22 A. No.
23 Q. Just a quantitative?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. Do you know why they were only able to find 23
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1 special education teachers when initially they had committed
2 to 200?
3 A. No, I don't have that information.
4 Q. And again, are these concerns going to be addressed
5 during these meetings to establish a corrective plan?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Now, have these -- I assume that -- I see from the
8 circulation list that the report was submitted to all high
9 level department people and the Board of Education, right?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. I don't see the court monitor's title here on the
12 circulation list. Is there any reason why the court monitor
13 is not included?
14 A. Well, as I mentioned earlier, the engagement, so to
15 speak, was with the superintendent's office, and I was not
16 aware of any communication protocol that would have to be
17 followed with regard to the federal court.
18 Q. I see.
19 A. The engagement was strictly with the office of the
20 superintendent.
21 Q. Then finding number 23, sir, significant amounts of
22 equipment purchases were made totaling over $87,000 which
23 were not authorized when compared to original budget
24 documentation. What are you referring to here?
25 A. This pertains to -- or is one of the areas that
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1 resulted in the budget communication finding whereby when I
2 questioned the field the answer was -- in some cases they
3 stated that if there was such a strict restriction on
4 equipment, that should have been clearly communicated before
5 expenditures were made.
6 Q. Did you conclude that there had not been those
7 communications? Was that part of the work that you did, was
8 to determine -- well, strike that.
9 Are you saying that for purchases that were not
10 authorized, the explanation was that they did not realize
11 that they needed to get authorization for those purchases; is
12 that what you're saying?
13 A. No, that's not what I'm saying.
14 Q. I'm sorry. Explain to me what you're saying.
15 A. Yes. For that particular finding it relates, I
16 believe, to the autism section, and the program manager had
17 developed the original budget documentation and plan of
18 expenditure to not include equipment.
19 Q. I see.
20 A. When the actual expenditures were made, however,
21 equipment purchases were made. So that resulted in the
22 inconsistency and that resulted in my finding that
23 communication of restrictions are not clearly channeled down
24 to those who are making the expenditures.
25 Q. So you concluded that in this case the person or
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1 persons who had made the expenditures did not realize that
2 authorization was needed because initially they had not
3 requested any equipment; is that a correct statement?
4 A. I'm sorry, what did you say?
5 Q. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, sir. I thought I
6 heard you testify that in the initial budget request there
7 was no reference to equipment being needed?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. And then subsequently equipment was purchased?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. What you're saying is the person who made the
12 purchase did not know that further authorization was needed
13 before that equipment could be purchased?
14 A. No. I'm saying that the persons in the field may
15 not know that there was a restriction not to purchase
16 equipment.
17 Q. All right. We might be saying the same thing. Did
18 you determine whether or not the persons in the field were
19 not aware of that?
20 A. Only through verbal communication.
21 Q. That's what I mean. You did call the person and
22 ask them why did you purchase this?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. And the person told you because we needed it?
25 A. Yes.
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1 Q. And you asked that person whether or not --
2 A. Right.
3 Q. -- they knew they needed to get further
4 authorization because the initial authorization hadn't
5 provided for that equipment? Something like that?
6 A. Something like that, yes.
7 Q. And they were not aware that they needed to do
8 that?
9 A. And additionally, however, you raised another point
10 that I wanted to make, in that in certain cases, such as
11 these autism expenditures, the persons in the field had
12 indicated that the program managers should have consulted
13 them as to what their needs were before finalizing the budget
14 documentations to begin with, then the communication of needs
15 for equipment would have been included in the original budget
16 documentation.
17 Q. I see. And then findings 25, 29, 33 have to do
18 with expenditures not in the budget.
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. You see that? And expenditures in the area of
21 $10,000 for various items, out of state travel, meals, food
22 provisions?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. Do you see that?
25 A. Yes.
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1 Q. You recommended that the DOE special education
2 section should develop a policy that either states that meals
3 and food provisions will or will not be provided at
4 meetings/training sessions or states that such items are not
5 to be expended from Felix response plan funds. Do you see
6 that?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. Are you recommending one way or the other or are
9 you just saying they need a policy one way or the other?
10 A. They need a policy one way or the other.
11 Q. But these expenditures, as far as you were
12 concerned, were not authorized because they were not in the
13 budget?
14 A. That's correct.
15 Q. Understanding that you will have -- or you are
16 holding the meetings for this corrective plan, do you have an
17 understanding as to whether or not a subsequent audit will be
18 performed by you to determine whether or not the
19 recommendations you made in this engagement are followed
20 through?
21 A. Your question is?
22 Q. Is it your understanding that your
23 recommendations -- the department has accepted your
24 recommendations?
25 A. Well, that a corrective action plan will be
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1 implemented, yes.
2 Q. And you're not aware of any of your
3 recommendations, for example, that the department has told
4 you we don't agree with that recommendation? You're not
5 aware of anything like that, are you?
6 A. There is one particular item.
7 Q. Okay. Which one?
8 A. And that is on page 3, the executive summary.
9 Q. What is that, sir?
10 A. The second to the last bullet, where the financial
11 management system should be revised to include a separate
12 code to control, C, expenditures which refers to equipment.
13 I understand that there is some disagreement with that item.
14 Q. That item?
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. But other than that, is it your understanding that
17 the department agrees with the remainder of your
18 recommendations?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. And that is what these meetings are for, to put
21 together a plan to implement all of your recommendations?
22 A. Yes. I should also point out that it is not my
23 primary responsibility to develop the corrective action plan.
24 Q. I understand.
25 A. It is the office of the superintendent that has
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1 taken the initiative to develop this plan. Since
2 Ms. Hamamoto is busy, I volunteered to assist her in this
3 effort.
4 Q. All right. I understand what you're saying.
5 Nonetheless, Mr. Koyama, in your position as internal
6 auditor, is it your understanding that you will conduct a
7 subsequent audit six months, a year from now to determine
8 whether or not these recommendations were in fact
9 implemented?
10 A. I would think that would be valuable, yes.
11 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA: Okay. I have no
12 further questions, Madam Chair.
13 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Members, we've
14 been going for about an hour, so let's give our court
15 reporter a break and reconvene in five minutes.
16 (Recess taken.)
17 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Members, we
18 will reconvene our hearing, and we will begin with
19 questioning by members starting with Vice-Chair Kokubun,
20 followed by Representative Ito.
21 VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN: Thank you,
22 Co-Chair Saiki.
23 EXAMINATION
24 BY VICE-CHAIR SENATOR KOKUBUN:
25 Q. Mr. Koyama, I wanted to ask about whether or not
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1 you had any knowledge or background about attorneys' fees for
2 the plaintiff attorneys. Is that something that was covered
3 by this audit?
4 A. Not that I know of.
5 Q. I know that you have certain findings in here, but
6 didn't you -- I'm assuming that you looked at the entire
7 expenditure or the appropriation and how it was expended with
8 respect to the Felix response plan?
9 A. Up through March 31st of the state appropriation,
10 yes.
11 Q. And within that you came up with certain findings?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. And areas of concern or that raise some questions?
14 A. Uh-huh.
15 Q. But did you look at the entire appropriation, did
16 you not?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. And are you saying, then, that within that entire
19 appropriation none of those funds were utilized in terms of
20 the plaintiff attorney fees?
21 A. Let's see. Not that I recall. Only court monitor
22 fees, as I recall.
23 Q. Court monitor fees, but that's not one of your
24 findings, is it?
25 A. It's included in the financial data as well as a
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1 statement somewhere. Let's see. On page 8 of 29 of the
2 financial data.
3 Q. Yes.
4 A. And page 11 of the audit report findings.
5 Q. I'm sorry, Mr. Koyama, could you repeat that for
6 me? I missed it.
7 A. Page 11 of the audit findings.
8 Q. Oh, with respect to ISPED? Oh, the court monitor's
9 bill. But in your understanding, any sort of plaintiff
10 attorney fees would not necessarily come under the court
11 monitor's bill, would it?
12 A. Would not.
13 Q. Would not?
14 A. Right.
15 Q. So that when you looked at these -- this
16 appropriation -- this emergency appropriation, none of those
17 funds were utilized for plaintiff attorney fees?
18 A. As far as I recall, yes.
19 Q. Do you happen -- have you -- are you familiar with
20 the entire budget for the Department of Education?
21 A. Somewhat, yes.
22 Q. Do you know -- can you help me with this question
23 about if I -- where I might be able to find the information
24 regarding plaintiff attorney fees?
25 A. Plaintiff attorney fees. I would say in the budget
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1 office of the department.
2 Q. Okay, that's fine. Thank you very much.
3 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
4 Representative Ito, followed by Senator Slom.
5 REPRESENTATIVE ITO: Thank you very much,
6 Co-Chair Saiki.
7 EXAMINATION
8 BY REPRESENTATIVE ITO:
9 Q. Mr. Koyama, in the DOE what are you? Are you a
10 specialist 3?
11 A. Specialist 2.
12 Q. So you are EO ranking, then?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. I wanted to ask you, you know, you mentioned the
15 FMS system, computer system?
16 A. Yes.
17 Q. And you recommended, what, some upgrades within the
18 computer system of the DOE?
19 A. Well, some mechanism of producing this data that
20 would be similar to the financial data that is in the audit
21 report, yes. It does not necessarily have to be an upgrade
22 of the existing system. It could be extractions of data from
23 there.
24 Q. When you mention the auditor's report, you mean the
25 legislative auditor?
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1 A. Oh, I'm sorry, my report.
2 Q. You know the legislative auditor recommended using
3 the program Insight?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. You know about that program?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. And that was a recommendation. What are you using
8 right now?
9 A. To comply with that particular issue?
10 Q. No. As far as, you know, you mentioned you wanted
11 software to upgrade the system for compiling, you know, data?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. Compiling the financial numbers and everything?
14 A. Yes, for the Felix response plan, yes.
15 Q. So you folks not using Insight?
16 A. Let's see. As I recall, we do have the software,
17 as I understand it, from our accounting office. I believe
18 they have chosen to extract data from what they call the data
19 warehouse that the department has to comply with those
20 requirements.
21 Q. You know this audit right here, this is -- this
22 audit was just for the superintendent of education?
23 A. Yes. It was -- as I mentioned earlier, it's what
24 we call an agreed upon procedure, engagement, where in this
25 case the deputy superintendent had instructed me to do this
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1 audit and there were certain agreed upon procedures that were
2 followed.
3 Q. Did you share this document with the Board of
4 Education?
5 A. Yes. On the front page, the distribution is also
6 copied to the Board of Education at the bottom.
7 Q. Are you aware that the Board of Education -- well,
8 they requested an auditor to audit you folks?
9 A. To audit the department, I believe so, yes.
10 Q. Why is that? I mean, what's the reason? Why do
11 you think the Board of Education wants an auditor to audit
12 you folks?
13 A. Well, I do feel -- do understand that they have a
14 right to establish -- to initiate any actions regarding
15 audits, and that would include establishing an auditor
16 position.
17 Q. You know the laptop computers for principals, the
18 allocation was over a half a million dollars.
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Is that correct?
21 A. Yes, that's correct.
22 Q. Why the principals need a laptop computer? What's
23 the reason?
24 A. One moment while I check my document. My
25 understanding is that that was part of what was called the
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1 administrators retention and relief effort, whereby
2 principals had complained that -- or my understanding is that
3 principals had complained that the Felix issues were a drain
4 on them, their administrative responsibilities, and in the
5 department's response plan, I believe, I'm not exactly sure,
6 but at any rate, it was intended as -- to provide assistance
7 to principals.
8 Q. So they get a regular computer in the office and
9 they need a laptop to take home to help them out?
10 A. I can't speculate what they would use it for.
11 Q. You know, Mr. Koyama, you know, this report is very
12 interesting and, you know, next week I'm going to call you up
13 and maybe you can help me understand this document right here
14 and maybe we can both do some corrective action. Thank you
15 very much.
16 A. I'm open to a phone call, yes.
17 Q. I'll call you up on Monday and maybe I can invite
18 Senator Sakamoto. So thank you very much.
19 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
20 Senator Slom, followed by Representative Kawakami.
21 SENATOR SLOM: Thank you, Co-Chair.
22 EXAMINATION
23 BY SENATOR SLOM:
24 Q. Mr. Koyama, you just said to Representative Ito
25 that it was the deputy superintendent that actually made the
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1 request for the audit?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. Correct?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Did you have any discussion with the
6 superintendent, either prior to or after the completion of
7 the audit?
8 A. No.
9 Q. None at all?
10 A. None at all.
11 Q. And when the request was made for the audit, was
12 there any discussion as to what the -- what the reason for
13 the audit was at that particular time?
14 A. Yes, all relating to the purpose that I had
15 documented, and that is to determine whether expenditures
16 that were made were made in accordance with what we said we
17 were going to do with reference to the Felix response plan,
18 emergency appropriation.
19 Q. Was there any reference made to making this
20 material available for questions that had been raised by the
21 legislature?
22 A. No.
23 Q. None at all. And you had mentioned when
24 Mr. Kawashima was asking you about the vacant positions and
25 so forth that you subsequently found out the answer to that?
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1 A. Yes.
2 Q. How did you subsequently find out? Did you ask
3 someone or did somebody volunteer that information to you?
4 A. Let's see. I don't exactly remember. Perhaps a
5 combination of both. I don't exactly --
6 Q. Do you remember who you might have talked to about
7 that, who explained it to you?
8 A. Well, for -- let's see. It might have been the
9 personnel section as well as Deputy Superintendent
10 Hamamoto --
11 Q. And one final question.
12 A. -- at the time.
13 Q. Pardon me?
14 A. At the time. Superintendent Hamamoto.
15 Q. You mentioned about data being in different places
16 and so forth and so on. Did you then have an understanding
17 as to the one person who would be responsible ultimately for
18 budgetary information relating to Felix?
19 A. Well, are you asking responsibility for this --
20 development and implementation of this particular reporting
21 or --
22 Q. Well, the overall Felix expenditures in accounting
23 within the DOE.
24 A. The reason for my question is that you had
25 mentioned budget earlier and accounting later, so in our
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1 organization those are two different areas.
2 Q. I see. So would there be two separate people,
3 then, that you could identify one for budgeting and one for
4 accounting?
5 A. Well, the implementation could take several
6 different approaches. I would say that normally in
7 organizations the responsibility for expenditures rests with
8 accounting.
9 Q. And in your recommendations, one of the things that
10 you did talk about was communications, a need to improve
11 communications?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. Would that be part of or is that an explanation of
14 your recommendations, that there should have been or should
15 be now better communications between the accounting and the
16 budgetary process?
17 A. It would help. As I mentioned earlier, the
18 budgetary process is a very complex and time consuming
19 process, and therefore, that is the reason why we have a
20 dedicated budget office in our department. As I see it,
21 organizationally it is problematic because the accounting
22 area and the budget areas are not -- do not report to each
23 other or are not under one umbrella, so to speak, except for
24 the superintendent's office, and so that has been one
25 contributing factor to the difficulties of coordinating the
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1 two responsibilities.
2 Q. Thank you, Mr. Koyama.
3 SENATOR SLOM: Thank you, Co-Chair.
4 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
5 Representative Kawakami, followed by Senator Sakamoto.
6 REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI: Thank you, Co-Chair.
7 EXAMINATION
8 BY REPRESENTATIVE KAWAKAMI:
9 Q. Mr. Koyama, I haven't gotten through this whole
10 report. I'm not even one-fourth through, and I'd like to
11 join Representative Ito and the chairman of the senate over
12 there, Sakamoto, when they call you, but I had a question
13 mainly on -- you know, your -- the program managers.
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. They have no in-service on how to do this kind of
16 financial audit and so forth. Therefore, the codes are
17 wrong, et cetera, et cetera, am I correct when I read this?
18 A. In general terms, yes, there are training
19 procedures that are done, but I would say they are
20 insufficient.
21 Q. It seems like it's above their head. So a lot of
22 things are missed, not picked up and so forth?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. You know, I applaud if you are doing this all by
25 yourself, a one-man operation. For you to even come up with
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1 this, you know, it just blows my mind.
2 A. Well, what I need to add to that is due to the fact
3 that they -- the program managers are insufficiently able to
4 handle these fiscal responsibilities due to perhaps lack of
5 training, the major problem is that they don't have data in
6 this format that I have developed, so it is difficult for the
7 department to hold them fiscally accountable for their
8 various areas, which is I think a very serious problem.
9 Q. So they've never had that kind of data up until
10 this time that you have produced that?
11 A. Well, they have received data, but --
12 Q. In no --
13 A. For example, payroll reports or financial
14 management system reports that compare actual expenditures to
15 allotments, not even to the original budget because the
16 budget data is in the budget office, you see, so that is an
17 example of that -- if you were to communicate with a
18 particular area in the department, they would say that, oh,
19 yes, they do get the data, but my point is that it is not in
20 a -- in one understandable report.
21 Q. You have to pick from here and there and so forth?
22 A. And those frustrations have been expressed to me.
23 Q. And so have you requested more help, number one?
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. And you're looking at how many people to help you?
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1 A. Well, I have submitted budget requests in every
2 biennium since I've been here in the department and there is
3 a -- currently there is a budget request in the supplemental
4 budget request for fiscal '03 specifically to address the
5 Felix concerns.
6 Q. I think you need it earlier. We need to push that
7 forward because, you know, I really feel badly that you've
8 got to be doing all of this. You need help.
9 A. And the budget requests that I have submitted have
10 not passed in the past.
11 Q. Has not passed?
12 A. Had not been approved in the past.
13 Q. Okay. Well, that's one thing we need to look at.
14 The other thing is I noticed this school year there were I
15 think SSCs and those people were going to be 12-month
16 employees?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. I had asked the question why they were going to
19 be -- at a previous meeting, why did they need them to be
20 12-months and didn't get an appropriate answer. Could you
21 answer it?
22 A. I'm sorry, I don't have that information.
23 Q. I think I heard it from the field, in fact, and
24 they were saying, well, you know, we teachers -- we have to
25 spread out our salary and these people are coming on board
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1 new, they pull them out of classrooms, et cetera and they are
2 going to be 12-month employees and going to be working on
3 this kind of thing, so, you know, some of them were very
4 upset, so I just wondered how -- I could see the ISPED
5 because they put data into the computer so you need that kind
6 of people, but the others I wasn't really sure because I
7 don't think you have that many students in summer school. Am
8 I correct? You have some youngsters probably that have --
9 A. It's a possibility. I'm not exactly sure.
10 Q. But not a whole lot, so here it is people, there's
11 quite a few that would be 12 months.
12 A. Yes, and the data of the conversion from ten to 12
13 months is in this report as well, as to the dollar amount.
14 Q. I'm not even looking. My time's up. Thank you.
15 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
16 Senator Sakamoto, followed by Representative Leong.
17 SENATOR SAKAMOTO: Thank you, Chair.
18 EXAMINATION
19 BY SENATOR SAKAMOTO:
20 Q. Hi, Mr. Koyama. In regards to, you know, your
21 recommendations, this was done several months ago, so at this
22 point in time do you feel that the department first -- others
23 in the department understand the problems that you've
24 addressed?
25 A. I would say in general, yes.
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1 Q. And do you feel that people in whichever capacity
2 from superintendent on down are addressing your
3 recommendations or educating you or saying why -- such as
4 with the temporary employees, et cetera why the
5 recommendations need to be maybe adjusted so you feel -- do
6 you feel comfortable with that?
7 A. In general, yes.
8 Q. So then let me go back to the global issue. So the
9 department requests dollars in many different pockets,
10 positions and dollars, then appropriations from this body and
11 the governor are made, then I guess you go to the allocation
12 system? I'm trying to follow up on what Mr. Kawashima was
13 asking. And then it goes to allotment?
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. So I'm in construction and we have job costs. So
16 we have a number of jobs, labor, materials, subcontract,
17 other, and each job is numbered, each cost code is numbered,
18 and as money is budgeted, there's budgets -- labor for these
19 items, material for these items, subcontractor or outsource,
20 et cetera, down the line. When you worked with Dillingham or
21 other companies, are you familiar with that type of job
22 costing system?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. Would that be something that would be beneficial to
25 help track the dollars in the Department of Education?
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1 A. I would say as it relates to the education field,
2 yes. Not necessarily construction per se.
3 Q. I'm saying that type of job cost. Although we do
4 construction, but Felix, this 27 million could be budgeted in
5 terms of a job with different cost codes?
6 A. Yes, the other term could be activities costs.
7 Q. Okay, activities costs.
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. So based on your existing hardware in the
10 department, can that be done with the existing hardware or
11 would you need new hardware?
12 A. There wouldn't -- my take is that there would not
13 need to be hardware per se. The immediate reaction I would
14 say from our staff would be the time necessary to program
15 what's necessary.
16 Q. So if you were to rewrite a program or just to cost
17 code expenditures?
18 A. There would have to be means of channeling the data
19 into proper boxes.
20 Q. Cost coding?
21 A. Yes. So not only defining the codes, but making
22 sure that they are properly organized when the final end
23 product comes out is another concern.
24 Q. Say Dillingham Corp. probably did $5 billion worth
25 of business and at the end of every month they had a report
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1 that said budget, cost to date, cost yet to complete,
2 over/under, so that's nothing new with billions and billions
3 of dollar corporations, although sometimes it takes longer,
4 but that's not --
5 A. Right.
6 Q. That's standard?
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. So is that something that the department should
9 work toward?
10 A. It can be. I would have to confer with the
11 superintendent.
12 Q. Because I guess from what we're hearing, budget is
13 on one hand, expenditure on another hand, and you have to
14 sort of pick and choose to compile this in two months. Where
15 if something were in place, you could audit but you would
16 already have all of this in a document.
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. So that would be the goal?
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Not just for this, but for any program or any
21 activity?
22 A. It would -- I would say it would have
23 ramifications, yes, for the other areas in the department.
24 Q. Based on -- last question. Based on your knowledge
25 in doing this audit or your other audits, what would be the
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1 biggest problem that we need to address? Is it dishonesty,
2 is it people using money they are not supposed to use, is it
3 people are overworked so they can't do what they are supposed
4 to do? What would one of the biggest barriers be?
5 A. When you say barriers, to --
6 Q. To not having things come out with -- instead of 38
7 items, maybe two items and everything else is falling in the
8 right pockets.
9 A. I see. I would say perhaps a long history of
10 things not changing and perhaps persons may be resistent to
11 new ways of doing things.
12 Q. Thank you.
13 SENATOR SAKAMOTO: Thank you, Chair.
14 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
15 Representative Leong, followed by Representative Marumoto.
16 REPRESENTATIVE LEONG: Thank you, Chair.
17 EXAMINATION
18 BY REPRESENTATIVE LEONG:
19 Q. Mr. Koyama, I was going to start off asking you
20 these questions. Number one, you're going to save the state
21 so much money and that if this goes through, if they follow
22 your recommendations, are you getting an increase in salary?
23 No. And number two, if they just give you a percentage of
24 what they're saving, you'd still be a rich person. And
25 number three, I wish I could hire you to be my independent
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1 auditor. I mean, this is wonderful. I know you are working
2 very hard on it, but I was just wondering as you look at some
3 of these things, things that are misgivings that are
4 happening, and I know you've submitted it in, what do you
5 think -- you're hoping that some of these things will revert
6 back, but do you think people are -- do you think people are
7 just -- accidentally this is happening? Because I look at
8 the school systems and I think if teachers could see this,
9 they would be very alarmed. You know, I just want to know
10 your reaction to that.
11 A. To the Felix response plan?
12 Q. Yes, to this in general, to your audit.
13 A. Oh, in general?
14 Q. Uh-huh.
15 A. It's kind of a hypothetical question.
16 Q. You think it's hypothetical? People are very happy
17 that we're on this committee.
18 A. Well --
19 Q. You know what, sir, don't put yourself on the spot.
20 A. I even forgot what you asked.
21 Q. Well, see, I notice that this is going out to
22 certain people, and I'm just wondering, shouldn't other
23 people get a report of this also?
24 A. Well, my understanding is that it is public record,
25 so...
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1 Q. Okay. I have no questions. Thank you very much
2 for your hard work .
3 REPRESENTATIVE LEONG: Thanks, Chair.
4 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Thank you.
5 Representative Marumoto, followed by Co-Chair Hanabusa.
6 EXAMINATION
7 BY REPRESENTATIVE MARUMOTO:
8 Q. Hello, Mr. Koyama. Just glancing through this it
9 looks like there's a couple of providers that you have a lot
10 of questions about, Columbus Educational Services contract
11 and the Classic -- is it, Classic Consultants?
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. They were just not performing, would that be your
14 assessment? I mean, they just seem to be -- have so many
15 problems with coming up with performing and fulfilling the
16 contract.
17 A. In the case of Columbus, the expectations were to
18 hire positions by certain deadlines, and they did not meet
19 those deadlines. In the case of Classic Consultants, again,
20 there were expectations for hiring of positions, and as I
21 understand it, there were concerns about meeting those
22 contract requirements as well.
23 Q. So Classic was supposed to hire psychologists and
24 Columbus was supposed to hire --
25 A. Special education teachers, certified teachers.
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1 Q. So that's two different contracts?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. And Sun Belt, is that another company that fell
4 short?
5 A. Regarding the recruitment of speech-language
6 pathologists. Well, that contract is based on an hourly
7 basis of employees, actual hours incurred. So although the
8 expectation of the numbers needed was high, the Sun Belt
9 organization apparently did not -- was not able to fulfill
10 the original expectations, but in terms of impact on cost,
11 the cost has been proportionately reduced because of the
12 hourly cost that they would incur. In other words, we were
13 not charged for the original expectation.
14 Q. It seems to me a lot of these people were hired
15 very late in the year, almost well after the money had been
16 appropriated. To what do you attribute this? Is it hard to
17 find these categories or are the salaries too low? Were the
18 consultants deficient?
19 A. I would say there would be many factors, and I'm
20 not the program area of expertise, so I wouldn't be able to
21 exactly explain.
22 Q. It just seems to be a real pattern in hiring very
23 slowly and then providers not meeting expectations.
24 A. Yes. My observation is that all of these employees
25 tend to be mainland, and so just the logistics of getting
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1 them over here is difficult.
2 Q. The consultants are mainland?
3 A. Well, the persons that the consultants hire are, as
4 I understand it, mostly mainland specialists, perhaps because
5 we do not have enough so-called qualified specialists
6 locally, and with those circumstances, bringing people from
7 the mainland as itself would -- will result in higher costs.
8 Also, the circumstances of the federal court decree having
9 deadlines, court -- federal court imposed deadlines also
10 shortens the time that is -- the department or the
11 consultants have to act upon the needs, and with that --
12 those circumstances, that would also contribute to possibly
13 higher costs.
14 Q. Well, I read here in finding number 24 the
15 department's view is that payments are due to Classic only
16 upon successful hire. Classic's view is the fee is payable
17 regardless of hire. I think the attitude of the provider is
18 all wrong there and --
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. I'm sure there's a written contract to fall back
21 on, right?
22 A. There is a contract. My observation is that the
23 contract could have been developed better.
24 Q. Thank you. I think there's a lot of lessons in
25 this audit. Thank you very much. I hope we take a lot of
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1 your advice and run a tighter ship in the future. The new
2 superintendent will have a tall order. Thank you.
3 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
4 Co-Chair Hanabusa.
5 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Thank you.
6 EXAMINATION
7 BY CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA:
8 Q. Mr. Koyama, when did you start your employment with
9 the Department of Education?
10 A. November '94.
11 Q. And since November '94, have you held the present
12 position that you hold?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. And you've always done these kinds of audits?
15 A. Not to the extent of this type for the Felix
16 response plan.
17 Q. How many audits have you done in the past, anything
18 related to Felix?
19 A. This is the only Felix-related audit.
20 Q. And the other audits that you've done were in what
21 areas?
22 A. Schools and offices. Don't recall exactly, but
23 primarily those are the assignments.
24 Q. And they were all for the superintendent over the
25 years?
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1 A. Yes, in -- what happens is that there are many
2 school needs that a request comes through to the
3 superintendent's office and those get assigned to me for
4 completion.
5 Q. As far as you know, were there any other type of
6 auditing, maybe not done by yourself, or any other audit that
7 within the Department of Education that you may have reviewed
8 or come across in doing yours?
9 A. Audits done of the --
10 Q. Within the department. Did you -- let me put it
11 this way. Maybe it's easier. Did you consult any other
12 audits before you did your own?
13 A. Yes, I reviewed the office of the auditor previous
14 audits.
15 Q. She's ours. I mean within your own department.
16 A. To do this Felix audit?
17 Q. Yes.
18 A. No, because the subject matter -- subject matter of
19 the other audits were not related to Felix.
20 Q. Okay, thank you. If you'll turn to page 14. It's
21 the Felix technical assistance provision. Do you see that?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. You know, one of the things that struck me as I
24 went through your audit is you see the DOE share of the court
25 monitor's bill?
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1 A. Yes.
2 Q. The court monitor's bill I think in every single
3 entry, and I found three different ones, always zeroed out,
4 whereas the other entries usually had some kind of remaining
5 balance. And if you want back up I found one on page 10,
6 that's $100,000 that's zeroed out, and there's also another
7 one, I believe, on page 23 that's 253,492 that's also zeroed
8 out. That's the only entry that I found that zeroed out by
9 March 31st.
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Do you have an explanation for that?
12 A. No, I do not.
13 Q. In other words, it seems like there's an amount
14 that the DOE has to pay the court monitor and it just pays
15 it, is that it, as far as you know?
16 A. As far as I know, yes.
17 Q. So do you know when the allocation is made and when
18 the expenditure made? Obviously, it's all made by March
19 31st, but do you know --
20 A. I don't know the exact timing of the expenditure.
21 Q. So the amounts -- like all of this will total just
22 about, oh, give or take, $900,000. That's only the DOE's
23 share, though, right?
24 A. As far as I understand, yes.
25 Q. The other thing on that same page, you see the
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1 reference to contract services that's transferred to impact
2 aid?
3 A. I'm sorry, page?
4 Q. I'm sorry, page 14.
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. Contract services and you have transferred to
7 impact aid.
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. Now, you said something and I just want to verify
10 it. You said this audit is only as to state funds?
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. So impact aids are federal funds?
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. So you did not go into any of this contract
15 services when it came to targeted technical assistance; is
16 that correct?
17 A. That's correct.
18 Q. Was there any audit done on impact aid monies that
19 may or may not have been used for Felix?
20 A. I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?
21 Q. Yes. Was there any audit done on impact aid funds
22 that may have been used for Felix? See, you've transferred
23 this to impact aid on this, so there must be this category
24 impact aid or something out there.
25 A. Yes.
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1 Q. So was there an audit done of impact aid, whatever
2 that means here, on Felix-related expenses?
3 A. Not that I know of. I did not do --
4 Q. So how did you decide contract services transferred
5 to impact aide, why did you do that?
6 A. Well, it's not that I did it per se.
7 Q. Okay.
8 A. Let's see.
9 Q. Well, were you told that that's not part of this
10 audit so just transfer it to impact aid?
11 A. No, that did not happen. I'm just merely trying to
12 remember the transactions that occurred that resulted in
13 this. Every year the department estimates the amount of
14 impact aid that is to be received from the federal
15 government, and as you know impact aide refers to the
16 assistance for education of military families.
17 Q. Right.
18 A. When the -- for fiscal 2000 -- 2000, when the
19 actual federal monies came in, they exceeded our estimates,
20 so there was an excess. The superintendent requested the
21 governor for approval to use the excess monies for department
22 needs, including Felix, and that request was approved by the
23 governor.
24 Q. Okay. I understand all of that.
25 A. And therefore those funds were used, in this
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1 particular case, to pay for the contract services under
2 targeted technical assistance. So for the purposes of my
3 audit of the state expenditures, those amounts were excluded.
4 So the word transferred does not mean that I personally
5 transferred the funds.
6 Q. No, I understand that.
7 A. It's just the focus of the state emergency
8 appropriation.
9 Q. I understand that. So I guess the question is,
10 there would have been some expenditures under contract
11 services, but because they were paid for by impact aid, they
12 were not part of this audit?
13 A. That's correct, yes.
14 Q. Do you know what the amount was in terms of
15 contract services that we may have found in that category?
16 A. Let's see. If you look at the financial data on
17 page 8 of 29, the section number 2 shows the amount that had
18 originally been planned for contract services under that
19 category.
20 Q. Okay.
21 A. 2 million, roughly.
22 Q. All right. Now, the next thing is you see the
23 program specialist and staff support transferred to priority
24 10?
25 A. Yes.
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1 Q. Can you turn to page 23?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. Then that's program 10, correct?
4 A. Actually -- oh, I'm sorry. Yes, that's correct.
5 Q. Now, the thing that caught my eye there, and I
6 represented it to you earlier, you have coordinated services
7 academy is the number 10?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. Then you have court monitor/technical assistance
10 panel, and that's the figure that I was telling you also
11 zeroed out.
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. My first question is how is it that the court
14 monitor amounts -- and I could only come up with three
15 different ones. There may be more, but in my review it's
16 under FRP 10, FRP 4, and FRP 2. What -- how did you
17 determine which ones of these Felix response plans would have
18 a court monitor fee divided into it or attributed to it?
19 A. Well, the answer to that is I did not personally
20 allocate those dollars in those categories. Those amounts
21 were included in the original budget, as I understand it, the
22 original budget documentation that would have been separated
23 into those 12 priorities of the response plan, you see, and I
24 was not involved in the categorization of the court monitor's
25 bill. I'm merely representing the budgeted dollars as
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1 originally categorized.
2 Q. So who originally categorized this?
3 A. I am not certain who per se. I'm not involved in
4 the Felix implementation of the response plan.
5 Q. So can you describe to me the document that you
6 receive that had all of this categorized in it?
7 A. Yes. Actually, it is in the 29-page -- excuse me,
8 29-page financial attachment.
9 Q. That you did?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Okay.
12 A. The reason is in order to prepare the document, I
13 needed -- the first step is getting budget data, and all of
14 this budget data was obtained from the budget office in the
15 format that you see.
16 Q. Okay.
17 A. And I went on to merely add on the expenditure data
18 for a comparison, but that process was very time consuming.
19 Q. Now we understand what it was you were doing. My
20 last question is in what you did. Did you interact at all
21 with Mr. Chris Ito?
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. And Mr. Chris Ito is in the budget department,
24 right?
25 A. No. He is in the -- he's the accounting director,
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1 which is what I was referring to earlier in that the budget
2 office is not the same as the accounting office.
3 Q. So did Mr. Ito assist you in looking at these
4 categories?
5 A. Only from the standpoint of obtaining supporting
6 documentation such as purchase orders for expenditures,
7 financial management reports, those types of things.
8 Q. How about Laurel Johnston, did you interact with
9 Laurel at all in doing your audit?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. And in what capacity or for what reason did you
12 interact with Laurel?
13 A. Asking questions about certain areas of the
14 analysis.
15 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Thank you.
16 Co-Chair Saiki.
17 EXAMINATION
18 BY CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI:
19 Q. Mr. Koyama, I just have a few questions, follow-ups
20 on the court monitor's allocations. There were three
21 separate allocations in your report that were mentioned and
22 they total approximately $900,000. Why were these amounts
23 separated into three different program areas?
24 A. Well, I think that relates to what Co-Chair
25 Hanabusa had asked, that I don't -- I was not involved in the
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1 development of the budget categorization, and particularly
2 with respect to the court monitor's bill, I was not involved
3 in the separation into the specific priority areas.
4 Q. Did you -- I handed you a copy of the document
5 dated June 15, 2000 which is, I think, the second draft of
6 the DOE's Felix response plan and categorizes the 12 priority
7 areas, and within those priority areas there's various line
8 items specified by the court.
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. Do you know whether or not the appropriation for
11 the court monitor was taken from this document? And I
12 recognize that this is, I think, the second draft of the
13 Felix response plan, because the total here is 28.2 million.
14 The amount that you actually worked with was 27.9 million.
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. But just in looking at this document, where did it
17 ever say that the court monitor needed to be paid out of
18 three separate priority areas? Did you ever look at this
19 document when you did your audit?
20 A. No, I did not. The reason for not looking at this
21 is that the amounts -- or the focus of the audit was the
22 final emergency appropriation amount, which is 27.9 million,
23 as opposed to 28.2, so since it was a preliminary document, I
24 did not refer to it.
25 Q. I think you mentioned in your audit for the court
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1 monitor's expenses that these expenses were paid pursuant to
2 the Felix response plan and the contempt order. Did you
3 review the contempt order?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Did the contempt order specify the amounts needed
6 to be paid to the court monitor's office?
7 A. That part I'm not exactly sure. I don't recall
8 offhand.
9 Q. Well, this -- your audit shows $900,000 as paid to
10 the court monitor, and that does not include the Department
11 of Health's share. Do you know what the health department's
12 share was?
13 A. No.
14 Q. Was it 50/50?
15 A. That I'm not -- I wasn't involved in the allocation
16 between the two departments.
17 Q. Do you know what the $900,000 was spent for?
18 A. Only from the standpoint of fees paid to the
19 monitor.
20 Q. Does the monitor submit invoices or receipts or
21 statements that specify how these dollars are spent, the
22 $900,000?
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. You have specific receipts and invoices?
25 A. The accounting office does, yes.
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1 Q. That shows the exact expenses of the monitor's
2 office?
3 A. I believe it -- there is an invoice. I'm not
4 exactly sure about the supporting documentation for that
5 invoice per se.
6 Q. Well, we'd like to request that you provide the
7 supporting documentation to our committee.
8 A. Sure.
9 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: I have no
10 further questions. So, members, are there any follow-up
11 questions? First, from special counsel?
12 SPECIAL COUNSEL KAWASHIMA: I have none.
13 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Senator
14 Sakamoto.
15 EXAMINATION
16 BY SENATOR SAKAMOTO:
17 Q. Mr. Koyama, many times auditors look at the
18 appropriateness of selecting a specific vendor or a specific
19 provider and many times state agencies come up with a list of
20 qualified and there's a line where some are not qualified.
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. In your auditing in this case or other cases in the
23 department, is that the normal procedure in the Department of
24 Education?
25 A. For audits you're referring to?
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1 Q. I guess I'm saying in your auditing work, in this
2 audit or in other audits, is it the normal case where a list
3 of providers or vendors that are qualified has -- is
4 established and then one of those is chosen for the actual
5 contract?
6 A. Well, if I am asked to audit a particular area that
7 had incurred expenditures that required that type of
8 procedure, yes, that would be part of the audit.
9 Q. So in the case of a vendor like Columbus, was there
10 a list of vendors and then Columbus was selected because they
11 qualified to do the work or in the list of some of the other
12 vendors was there a list and then -- and the best qualified
13 was selected?
14 A. Well, my understanding of this is that the federal
15 court had allowed the superintendent's office certain powers
16 that allowed exemption from procurement regulations, and so
17 that -- and also that particular area was not specified in my
18 original agreed upon procedures for this engagement. So that
19 was not part of what I had set out to do.
20 Q. So your scope of this particular audit didn't
21 include the appropriateness of if indeed the vendor was the
22 most qualified?
23 A. It did not.
24 Q. But in other -- when you look at a school or you
25 look at the bus system or you look at school lunch, would
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1 that normally be part of your audit?
2 A. Yes. As I mentioned, if there were expenditures
3 made in the area that I was auditing that required -- that
4 were -- in which the state procurement law applied, then that
5 would be part of the audit, yes.
6 Q. Seems to me even if the law applies or not, in
7 other words, when you buy something for your house, there's
8 no procurement law but a prudent person would normally look
9 at more than one vendor, unless you already had developed I
10 like Ford cars and then maybe you just go to Ford, but most
11 people with no procurement law -- due diligence would look at
12 a qualified list or establish one.
13 A. Well, I would be speculating, but I guess I can't
14 speculate for others.
15 Q. But you would -- a prudent person concerned about
16 dollars would --
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. But that wasn't the scope. And in this audit or in
19 your audits you didn't talk about selecting specific
20 providers for child care. This is more within the department
21 use of funds for positions as opposed to what service a child
22 received?
23 A. That's correct, yes.
24 Q. So that would be -- who would -- who would be the
25 appropriate person to ask that type of question?
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1 A. Are you talking about program audits or --
2 Q. I guess in the sense of if you wanted a
3 psychologist and four people or ten people wanted to provide
4 the service and ultimately one was selected, who would be the
5 appropriate person to ask in the department about those types
6 of issues?
7 A. As to the evaluation of the decisions that were
8 made or --
9 Q. If one person were selected or one entity and why?
10 A. Well, the only reference that I can make is that
11 there are different types of audits and that although I have
12 done a financial-related type of audit, occasionally auditors
13 are asked to do what's called performance audits which relate
14 to effectiveness and efficiency of management decisions, and
15 those -- that would be the type of audit that would be
16 requested. As a practical matter, since I'm the only person
17 in my section, I am not able to do those without additional
18 resources.
19 Q. Thank you.
20 SENATOR SAKAMOTO: Thank you, Chair.
21 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Thank you.
22 Representative Ito.
23 REPRESENTATIVE ITO: Thank you, Co-Chair
24 Saiki.
25 EXAMINATION
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1 BY REPRESENTATIVE ITO:
2 Q. Mr. Koyama, you know, have you ever been involved
3 with any reorganization or organizational plan for the DOE?
4 A. No, I have not.
5 Q. What about have you ever done any management audit?
6 A. No. And that's -- the management audit is what I
7 was referring to earlier in performance program type audits
8 of evaluating management decisions. Those I have -- internal
9 audits, internal auditors can do those but as a practical
10 matter I do not have the time or resources to do those
11 things.
12 Q. Have you been asked to do any reorganizational type
13 of performance audit?
14 A. No.
15 REPRESENTATIVE ITO: Thank you.
16 CO-CHAIR REPRESENTATIVE SAIKI: Members, any
17 other follow-up questions?
18 If not, Mr. Koyama, thank you very much for
19 testifying today.
20 CO-CHAIR SENATOR HANABUSA: Members, that ends
21 the hearing for today. We will be reconvening on October
22 31st at 9:00 o'clock. Costumes are not required, but if you
23 want, you are more than welcome. Thank you very much. See
24 you on Wednesday.
25 (Hearing adjourned at 3:30 p.m.)
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198
1 STATE OF HAWAII )
2 ) ss:
3 CITY & COUNTY OF HONOLULU )
4
5 I, JESSICA R. PERRY, do hereby certify:
6 That on October 27, 2001, at 9:09 a.m. the
7 foregoing proceedings were taken down by me in machine
8 shorthand and was thereafter reduced to typewritten form by
9 computer-aided transcription; that the foregoing represents,
10 to the best of my ability, a full, true and correct
11 transcript of the proceedings had in the foregoing matter.
12 I further certify that I am not attorney for
13 any of the parties hereto, nor in any way concerned with the
14 cause.
15
16 DATED this 12th day of November 2001, in
17 Honolulu, Hawaii.
18
19
20
21
22
23 Jessica R. Perry, CSR 404
Notary Public, State of Hawaii
24 My commission expires: 5/11/03
25
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