"That's what parents are so upset about," said Jolaine Moffett, co-founder of Citizens for Child Protection Reform. "The system created this big monolith and then defies its own rules by violating falsely accused parents' constitutional rights.

"There are many, many parents who find themselves victims of false allegations and are often just told to plead no contest," said Moffett, whose new coalition of parents has drafted an overhaul plan for child welfare and set up a new e-mail address Friday: cprpilotproject@yahoo.com.

"And everything's done in juvenile court that's closed to the public so nobody really knows what's going on," he added.

"It's a secret society, they're all buddies and when they're threatened they clench up like a fist," said Wayne Searle, an outspoken critic of the child welfare system in Utah and an attorney for accused parents.

"There's always going to be this debate," said Mark May, new child protection division chief in the attorney general's office. "No matter what the division does, somebody's not going to be happy. We went through a period of not doing enough to now we're being accused of doing too much."

Perhaps most vile to parental rights reformers is the financial incentive they say is built into the child protection system. They claim that like any government bureaucracy, its real mission is self-preservation.

They say while child welfare administrators would never admit to having quotas, and it's doubtful any caseworker ever took the job so they could split up families, that does not change the fact that for every child involved in an abuse case 15 to 25 people have jobs that depend on keeping the child or replacing him in the system.

A parent will get a huge tax break for adopting, and if parental rights can be terminated and a child permanently placed, states actually receive bonuses.

In Utah in the fiscal year that ended June 30, slightly less than $113 million in state and federal funds was spent on child welfare and child protection services.

DCFS received 19,284 abuse referral calls and tended to 1,900 children in state custody (foster care). DCFS says it costs a per-child average of $35,087 per year for foster care.

Of the possible abuse incidents reported to DCFS in the 12 months ending April of this year, 7,209 were substantiated as abuse. Of those, 1,914 children were removed from their homes.

DCFS director Richard Anderson said the funding mechanism for child welfare is painted as sinister but isn't. "No one here thinks, 'If I take more kids, I'll keep my job,' " he said.