In almost all of these cases, the substance of investigations is kept confidential, making it difficult to know if there are other cases where social workers overlooked alarming evidence of abuse. Social services officials operate in near-impervious secrecy, which is bolstered by some of the nation's strictest confidentiality laws, making public oversight and accountability of individual child welfare investigations almost impossible.

Because of this, it would have been easy for the troubling details of the Yoder case to stay buried forever.

Okay. What can we do to change this? This is basically a blank check authorizing rampant corruption.