Announcement Regarding CAII’s Hague Accreditation
Dear Families;
We received an email from Council On Accreditation (COA) May 7th, 2008 indicating that CAII was denied Hague Accreditation. We received a final PCR (Post Commission Report) a few hours after that notification. There were only five items that we were out of compliance on and none of them were foundational nor did any of them correspond to unethical practices. And, four of these five were new - we were NOT notified before in prior reports. All five are minor infractions. In order to give you full disclosure we are outlining them below. We want you to feel confident in CAII and understand that these are negligible and we have every intention of formally appealing this decision and petition for Hague Accreditation. This process has already begun.
From PCR
- This was a clear oversight/misunderstanding on their part. They believe our CEO (Marina Mayhew) is the chairman of the board for CAII and that is not correct. The chairman of the board is James Sellers. Marina is not on the board at all. We have a policy that states our board members and officers are not compensated and that is true - they made a mistake here.
- There was a conflict in one of our policies with our contract regarding fees. We simply need to augment our policy to reflect make them consistent.
- Budget - they noticed an inconsistency in the budget regarding compensation - but that is because some of our staff has agreed to change their compensation as of the past 60 days. We are unsure why this was sufficient to deny us nevertheless we will send a narrative explaining that is the case.
- There is a complete misreading/misinterpretation of a section of our contract. We are bewildered by this response and will clarify its intent and reword the contract so that intent is interpreted appropriately.
- COA is saying that we have not notified them about closing our Colorado office. We, indeed did notify them on February 27, 2008. We still have our license and are operating currently to complete current home study families and thus had not notified them of the closure because we are, in fact, still operating.
We are sharing these details so you are not left guessing or assuming why we were denied. We also wanted you to rest assured that we feel confident we can get this decision overturned during the appeal process, especially given how minor the infractions are/and or the misunderstanding that ensued. We are unsure of how quickly the appeal process will take but estimate it between 30-60 days.
Most of you will not be impacted at all by this development. If you have submitted your I-600A form to USCIS (and all supplemental documents including home study) before April 1st , 2008, then we can still facilitate your adoption. There will be no disruption in your adoption process. However, it is imperative that you not let your I-171H approval expire. It must be kept current, otherwise youíd have to reapply using the I800A form and as such we could not be your placing agency until we gain our Hague Accreditation.
If, however, you have signed up with us for a Hague Convention country (Brazil, Colombia and/or India) and did not submit your I-600A form before April 1st, then at this moment we cannot complete your adoption. However, if we get this denial overturned then we can complete your adoption. Remember, however, that we are appealing this decision and feel confident we can gain our Hague Accreditation in short order. Please contact your Case Manager to discuss the details with you if this situation applies so we can help guide you to the best decision for your family.
We are completely awestruck at this decision and will work diligently to resolve it.
Most Sincerely,
CAII Staff
