Auditor of Public Accounts Allison Ball urged a legislative committee on Tuesday to approve Senate Bill 85. In this photo, she congratulates her campaign team after speaking at an election night celebration, Nov 7, 2023, in Louisville. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Matthew Mueller)
After mediation and a judge’s order, Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball says the legislature needs to codify her office’s access to an important database kept by the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
During a Tuesday committee meeting, Ball told lawmakers the cabinet appears to not be forwarding every complaint it receives about itself to the ombudsman, housed in her office. She said she wants to make sure no complaints are “missing in the process.”
“Right now, the cabinet is acting as a gatekeeper on those complaints,” Ball said. “We feel like we don’t need a middleman. Things are being dropped in the handoff. So, this will resolve that situation to make sure we have access to all the complaints when they come in.”
Judge inks ceasefire in state government battle over new ombudsman’s access to information
This comes almost five months after the Cabinet for Health and Family Services and the office of the ombudsman settled a dispute over access to a computer system called iTWIST, which stores information about abuse and neglect cases.
The Senate Families and Children Committee unanimously approved Senate Bill 85, which clarifies the ombudsman gets “any software and access rights.”
Ball’s office assumed oversight of the ombudsman from the cabinet on July 1, thanks to a law enacted in 2023 by the legislature, Senate Bill 48. But her office did not get immediate access to iTWIST.
The ombudsman, whose job is to investigate and resolve complaints about agencies in the cabinet, including protective services for children and elderly Kentuckians, can’t do that job without access to iTWIST, (the Workers Information System), Ball has said. She eventually filed a lawsuit for the access, and the case was mediated and eventually settled in Franklin Circuit Court.
“We reached a settlement in that mediation, and we were given access with certain structures in place,” Ball told committee members Tuesday. “We feel like it is now necessary to codify it, make it abundantly clear there’s no possibility of this coming up again, that we have access to iTWIST.”
The September court order that settled the access dispute said the cabinet would have to provide the ombudsman with read-only access to iTWIST. Judge Phillip Shepherd also said the legislature and the parties would work during the 2025 session to codify any needed clarification.
A spokeswoman for the auditor said the office “can compare the number of complaints received by the ombudsman before the transition with the current number, which has drastically decreased.”
“This is due in part to the failure to transfer the previous phone number, resulting in our office not receiving all complaints,” said Joy Pidgorodetska Markland, the auditor’s director of communications. “Upon suspecting complaints were not being forwarded, we used an open records process to request all communications sent to the retained phone number and email and found many un-forwarded complaints.”
SB 85, sponsored by Sen. Stephen Meredith, R-Leitchfield, has an emergency, meaning it would take effect immediately upon becoming law.
“This is an emergency because we know this needs to be done right away,” Ball said. “That way we can move forward without any more hang ups and make sure the public is provided everything that they need.”
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