Last update - 00:00 17/11/2006
Committee investigating Welfare Ministry finds severe failures
By Niv Hachlili and Ruth Sinai, Haaretz Correspondents
The Welfare Ministry lacks a guiding hand, its management is weak, its decision-making processes are disorganized and its workers' committee has it in thrall, an investigative committee has concluded.
The committee was appointed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is responsible for the Welfare Ministry in the absence of a minister of its own for the past two years. The committee is to scrutinize irregularities in the ministry's authority dealing with teens who are wards of the state.
The committee, headed by the director of the southern district of the Education Ministry, Amira Haim, has recommended taking disciplinary action against five senior Welfare Ministry officials. Remarks are to be entered in the personnel records of director general Moshe Sion, deputy senior director general for administration and human resources Tami Sleiman, and the director of the department of human resources Moti Elisha. Dismissal has been recommended for the director of the youth ward authority, Reuven Yaakov, and his deputy Eliyahu Debi.
The harsh report, a copy of which reached Haaretz, describes infractions of the law and endangerment of wards in dozens of homes.
According to the committee's report, the lack of a guiding hand within the ministry and in particular within the authority "has led to a lack of discipline and disobedience at every level."
The report notes that Sion, Sleiman and Elisha are serving under temporary appointments, and ministry deputy director Menachem Vagshal is still serving in his previous position as a department head, and will now also be head of the youth ward authority for a year. The report states that the workers' committee has strengthened as a result of the weakness of the ministry's management. In the ensuing power struggles, two camps formed: Debi's, which is supported by the workers' committee, and Yaakov's. The committee found that Sleiman had taken sides, allowing Debi to change the order of who answers to whom in the youth ward authority without the knowledge of Debi's superior.
The committee was shown three organizational structures for the authority and found them contradictory, unclear, and not reflecting reality. Ministry staffers told the committee they had been subject to threats, pressures and harassment if they dared to support Yaakov. One senior supervisor had her desk taken away from her as punishment for supporting Yaakov. Another worker received a negative assessment from Debi and was fired as a result. When she approached human resources chief Elisha, and asked him to consider the positive assessment she had received from Yaakov, she said he rejected her request and told her Yaakov "did not count."
The committee found that on the instructions of the workers' committee, the investigation was thwarted by a serious incident in which wards barricaded themselves on the roof of the Gil-Am home in Kiryat Haim. The workers' committee also demanded that deputy director general Vagshal not meet with personnel in the youth ward authority.
The committee found a possible conflict of interests in that the head of the workers' committee, Moshe Deri, is also a supervisor in the youth ward authority.
Sion reportedly feels that the report, which he received two weeks ago, has done him a disservice, since the crisis in the authority has been going on for some years. He is said to have tried to deal with it, among other things by calling in Yaakov and other senior authority officials for a meeting three months ago.
Dozens of senior youth ward authority officials protested Reuven's dismissal on Thursday to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.