DFPS Considers Dropping Its “Unable to Determine” Abuse Finding As Families Press House Panel

Texas lists 795,000 people on its Central Abuse Registry, and the agency that maintains it told a House committee Sept. 9 that it wants to stop issuing one of the findings that decides who goes on it.

Audrey O’Neill, commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, told the House Committee on Human Services the agency is “in the process of considering what it would look like to eliminate our” unable-to-determine finding. “We would really like to do that,” she said. “We think that it would be better to move forward.”

The finding closes about 11 percent of investigations, neither substantiating abuse nor clearing the family. Investigations end “ruled out” 63 percent of the time and with a “reason to believe” finding 25 percent of the time, O’Neill said. Only the last of those puts a name on the registry, along with the names of people under an open investigation, which runs an average of 29.2 days.

Ninety-four percent of the 795,000 have been listed more than two years. About 412,000 — roughly 53 percent — carry only a neglectful supervision finding that produced no fatality or near fatality. Between Sept. 1, 2020 and Aug. 31, 2025, the Health and Human Services Commission ran more than 2.4 million registry checks on prospective day care and foster care employees. In each of the last five fiscal years, O’Neill said, “less than one quarter of 1% of central registry checks actually resulted in a bar to employment.”

O’Neill described changes already made without legislation. In the last nine months the department added a team of “very seasoned investigators who read findings before we finalize” a reason-to-believe determination and must independently validate that the evidence meets the preponderance standard. “We are seeing that reduce the number of” such findings, she said, “because in some cases, it’s a matter of what you documented, not whether or not the determination was correct.”

Members spent much of the charge on a narrower question: what a parent is allowed to see. Chair Lacey Hull, R–Houston, pressed the Forensic Assessment Center Network — the UT-run program that gives caseworkers medical opinions in abuse investigations — on whether families ever learn that the doctors reviewing their case disagreed with one another. “Do the parents ever get that information that there were other providers within the FACN that disagreed?” Hull asked.

When the answer described how disagreements move back to DFPS, she pushed again. “If one or more people are voting and they disagree, did the parents know that? And I guess why they disagree with, is that information shared?”

The exchange grew out of House Bill 2071, Hull’s own 2025 law on specialty medical consultations in abuse investigations. Nicole Zaharia, the UTHealth Houston project manager who runs the network, said the law produced a formal route for DFPS to seek a second opinion from a different site when the original provider made the referral itself, and that reviewers now log what information they used.

Rep. Candy Noble, R–Lucas, picked up the thread and asked whether a child’s own pediatrician is part of that record. “I’ve heard this testimony now for four sessions,” Noble said. “And I’ve seen great improvement over time, and I’m just so grateful for that.” But, she added, if a child’s ongoing medical record informs the finding, “then parents should be allowed to see whatever you come up with.” Noble also authored House Bill 140, the 2025 law that created the child protective investigations advisory committee now reviewing agency practice.

Then the families testified, and the afternoon turned. Travis Rivera told members his nine-week-old daughter went limp in November 2023 and that the family stayed at the hospital and pushed for more testing. Imaging found fluid around the child’s brain. “That is how our medical emergency became a CPS case,” he said.

His wife, Marcella Rivera, said she was not asking the committee to stop investigations. She was asking it to look at what happens after an allegation is made. “There is an enormous difference between protecting a child from immediate danger and allowing an allegation to become a conclusion before an investigation is complete,” she said.

Having listened to the commissioner describe the department’s safeguards, she said either the field is not following the handbook or no one is held to it. “A policy sitting in a handbook is not the same thing as a protection that a family can actually rely on. A procedure that can be ignored without consequences is not really a safeguard, and a right that exists on paper but cannot be meaningfully enforced, isn’t meaningful due process.”

Josh Burns of Rockwall told members he was convicted in Michigan of abusing his infant daughter, served time, and was exonerated in November 2024 after the state attorney general’s conviction integrity unit and the Michigan Innocence Clinic took his case. “I’m not here today for sympathy,” he said. “I’m here because what happened to me and to my family is still happening right now in every single state across this country, including Texas.”

Noble said the testimony would feed a best-practices project already under way. “For far too long we’ve seen quite a variety of CPS competency across the state,” she said. Rep. Toni Rose, D–Dallas, who investigated cases for the agency’s predecessor beginning in 1993, said she had heard the same account three decades earlier. “That culture does happen, but it was happening back then,” Rose said. “And it just saddens me to know that it continues to happen.”

Vice Chair Christian Manuel, D–Port Arthur, said he and Rep. Shelby Slawson, R–Stephenville, had raised similar concerns weeks earlier in the Select Committee on Governmental Oversight.

No votes were taken; no legislation was before the panel. Hull closed by thanking the speaker for letting the committee “start these conversations early, ahead of session, as we have a lot of work to do before the 90th.” That Legislature convenes in January 2027.