Some at Clark County Family Services may be wondering why they can never catch a break.

But their current predicament is largely a result of their own predilection for secrecy, cover-ups and "happy face" reporting.

Late last year, Ed Cotton, a consultant retained by the department, finished reviewing a sample of 1,352 open county child welfare cases. His report detailed problems with inconsistent case documentation, failure to investigate abuse and neglect allegations in a timely fashion, poor caseworker training, lax supervision and a failure to regularly visit children in open cases.

He and his associates also identified 55 cases in which they believed children were either in danger or unaccounted for. County authorities prevailed upon their consultant to delete those cases from his public report.

When word of the withheld reports leaked out, the state Department of Health and Human Services on Feb. 2 joined Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid in demanding proof of action in the 55 cases.

On Thursday, county officials reported they've checked it out and there's nothing to worry about: All 55 kids are fine.

Basically -- following a year in which foster children died or disappeared while in county custody and county caseworkers routinely failed to visit children under their care -- no one believed them.

"Nowhere in this report do they say what information they're relying on," objects Bill Grimm, senior attorney for a child advocacy group suing Clark County over alleged failure to secure the safety of minors in government care. "That's a glaring deficiency. How do we know this alleged documentation even exists? ... That's the county's track record. They try not to let anything see the light of day because that will expose the nature and extent of the problem."

Even the county's own consultant, Ed Cotton, is skeptical.

"For a while, I thought that the reports would result in changes being made in Clark County, by Clark County," Mr. Cotton said last week. "I don't think that anymore. I think the commitment is more toward explaining the problems away rather than fixing them."

In some cases, the 15-page report released by Family Services on Thursday argued Mr. Cotton's concerns were based on inaccurate information. In others, the report found allegations of abuse or neglect to be unsubstantiated. In one case, in which Mr. Cotton's report said a county caseworker felt a blind child was at risk after being returned to an abusive mother, the county review reports "permanency worker indicates she never told this to the reviewer. ... Child was assessed to be safe with mother."

Children should indeed be with their birth parents whenever possible. But Mr. Cotton -- who has now agreed to serve as an expert witness for Mr. Grimm's National Center for Youth Law in its lawsuit against the county -- responds: "The point needs to be made that we didn't just look at case files. We interviewed the caseworkers. We also asked to interview the families involved, but our request was denied because of concerns about confidentiality. ... My reviewers didn't make things up. They had no reason to. We weren't paid by the mistake."

Yet now Family Services says everything is hunky-dory because concerns about abuse are "unsubstantiated," because a caseworker -- perhaps concerned about job security -- insists, "I never said that"?

Critics also object that, in many cases, last week's county report only documents the most recent visit by a caseworker, offering no assurance that caseworkers have visited the children at least once a month, as required by law.

"In the end, we determined that all the children are currently safe," Tom Morton, the county's director of Family Services, said last week.

In response, "We're pulling together a team to review and verify the findings," replies Frank Serrano, an administrator with the state Department of Child and Family Services.

Good.

The default setting should be to reunite families whenever possible, rather than creating bureaucratic or financial incentives to keep kids in foster care, where they can be at statistically greater risk of harm.

But somehow, the county agency needs to figure out how to triage these cases, identify the most serious, and then supervise those more rigorously, while keeping better records of what its workers are up to.

This is not some less-than-minimum-wage charity, where it's hard to ask the volunteers to do more than "the best they can." County workers are well compensated, and Family Services is supported with lots of tax dollars.

Taxpayers have a right to expect more than, "Everything's OK -- just trust us."