Intercountry Adoption Universal Accreditation Act of 2012 UPDATED

PEAR has the scoop   on the two bills introduced to standardize accreditation for adoption service providers regardless of whether they are Hague-approved or not.

House bill 6027 pdf here.

Senate bill 3331 pdf here.

Holt International is publicly supporting the bills. See that acknowledgement here.

Rally thinks this step is necessary and has the potential to provide teeth to investigating wrongdoings of and for punishing agencies in the future.

The bills themselves are quite sparse and leave room for the lucrative adoption industry to twist this to their monetary advantage. If you read the comments that PEAR links to of Senator Landrieu in part “Additionally, I hope that this bill will prompt the U.S. Department of State to consider financially supporting the accrediting entities to relieve part of the financial burden on smaller agencies and to ensure a robust accreditation process..”It sounds like taxpayers may have to foot the bill for accreditation.

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Update: On January 14, 2013, President Obama signed this bill into law. The text can be seen through the Library of Congress site in this pdf. This does apply to agencies only working in nonHague countries. As Women’s Policy.org says “The measure gives the secretary of the Department of State, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the attorney general (Department of Justice), and accrediting entities authority to enforce such universal accreditation standards.”

Again, this is a great step towards reining in some of the bad adoption players, but I am still very concerned with the possibility that taxpayers will be footing the bill for the accreditations of the scum agencies as the powerful Senator Landrieu has previously indicated. It is also concerning that JCICS is “championing” this because that usually means that their agency members will be gaining a benefit–in this case my guess is taxpayer-paid accreditations.We will update this post as we learn more of the implementation of this.