Summer MoE "Black List" Update

EDITED: The list has been updated since this blog post. For the most current list, please see the links in my article about the black list.


Sometime over the weekend, the Russian Ministry of Education & Science (MoE) posted a mid-summer update to its list of home study and post-placement providers who are considered late in submitting one or more post-placement reports about adopted Russian children. This controversial list, also known informally as the "MoE Black List," has been published at irregular intervals by the Russian authorities since early 2009, in an effort to collect overdue post-placement reports.

Every family adopting a Russian child is obligated by Russian law to provide a post-placement report at the 6 month, 12 month, 24 month, and 36 month milestones following adoption. Normally, the family's home study provider must submit a post-placement obligation letter along with the home study and other documents used in the adoption process. When they find one or more post-placement reports missing, the regional authorities can add a provider's name to the master list kept by the Russian federal MoE. Likewise, when a late report is submitted, they can remove the provider's name from the list. Adopting families whose documents are prepared by a provider on the list may be at risk for delays in their adoption process. For more information, please see my article about the list.

As usual, the most recent version of the list, dated July 20, 2010, was published as an attachment to a public ministerial letter written by the Russian federal MoE to the regional authorities in all Russian regions. This latest version of the list contains 135 total USA providers, with 46 providers removed and 56 providers added (or re-added after having been previously removed). That represents a net gain of 10 USA providers since the April 2010 release. Most of the updates this time appear to have been made by the Kemerovo, Murmansk, Stavropol, and Krasnoyarsk regions.

If your provider is on the July 2010 list, please feel free to point them to my article for adoption service providers about how to be removed from the list.