HARRISBURG — An internal Pennsylvania state government watchdog agency is criticizing how county-level agencies investigate thousands of complaints they receive about elder abuse and how the state ensures complaints are investigated adequately.

Among the shortcomings the Office of State Inspector General identified were failures by some county-level agencies to properly investigate complaints under timelines required by state law and inadequate staffing of the state office that monitors those agencies.

A six-page summary of the report also said investigative practices aren’t standardized across counties and it criticized training requirements for caseworkers as far too weak, particularly compared to model states.

Complaints can involve physical abuse, self-neglect or financial exploitation and Pennsylvania, like other states, is seeing a fast-growing number of complaints that has forced some counties to hire more caseworkers to keep up.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration said it has begun to address the report’s findings. In the days before it released the report’s summary, Wolf cleared out the top two officials in his Department of Aging, which oversees what is called protective services for people who are 60 and older.

The Pennsylvania Association of Area Agencies on Aging, which speaks for the 52 county-level agencies, said those organizations and the Department of Aging “have made significant improvements” since the inspector general’s investigation began.

The Associated Press in 2017 reviewed hundreds of pages of Department of Aging records and found the performance of the county-level agencies varied widely. The department’s reviewers had told some counties that they had failed, sometimes repeatedly, to meet regulations and expectations over properly investigating complaints and logging casework.

Caseworkers handled nearly 32,000 calls about potential elder abuse in the 2017-18 fiscal year, according to department records, up from 18,500 five years earlier.

Frustrated by shortcomings identified in elder-abuse investigations, department staff in 2017 began grading counties on a compliance schedule, and more than a third of the 52 county-level area agencies on aging have received a substandard red or yellow rating, according to information from the department.