(Bigstock)

There’s a decent chance that sooner or later, you or a loved one will need a personal-care attendant.

I’ve already been there, having to arrange personal in-home care for my mother before she died. Fortunately, most of the attendants we hired were good. That’s not the case with the miscreants described in a report released Tuesday by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (OIG).

HHS comes off as an enabler. Some attendants were fraudulently paid while neglecting suffering patients as the department failed to implement years-old recommendations to correct the scandal, according to the OIG.

“Significant vulnerabilities,” the OIG said, “including a lack of internal controls” continue to plague the program.

Building on the OIG’s 2012 study, investigators found “significant and persistent compliance, payment, and fraud vulnerabilities” with the personal-care services (PCS) program. It was a $12.7 billion operation in 2011. In many cases, the attendants work for personal-care agencies that bill Medicaid for their services. States operate their own Medicaid programs under federal guidelines.

Since that six-year-old study was issued, the new review, first reported by CBS News, said the OIG has opened more than 200 investigations of possible fraud and patient harm and neglect in the PCS program across the country.

Because the federal government provides much of the funding, it has a responsibility to make sure that people are not harmed or ripped off. But the OIG says officials in the department’s Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have not implemented previous recommendations that could have prevented some of the ongoing problems.

The OIG said it “continues to recommend” that CMS “take regulatory action to establish safeguards that will prevent fraudulent or abusive providers from enrolling or remaining as PCS attendants” and better protect against “fraud and patient harm and neglect.”