DENVER -- Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper said the city would hire a consultant to verify the caseload Denver Department of Human Service case workers carry after a CALL7 investigation showed the department did not hire an additional 40 workers to lower child protection staff workload.

"The only way I know how to deal with that is to hire again, -- bring on a consultant who will actually go and go through every single file and find out exactly how many cases are there," Hickenlooper told CALL7 Investigator John Ferrugia.

On Thursday, 7NEWS broke the story that DDHS did not hire 40 additional workers it promised to bring on after a four children, whose families were under the agency's supervision, died.

A CALL7 analysis showed that since March 2008 when a report recommended dealing with the department's caseload, DDHS managers had hired 40 workers but about as many quit or were terminated.

"I think we end up with a plus two or plus three," conceded DDHS director Pat Wilson-Pheanious after 7NEWS brought her our figures.

DDHS had posted on their Web site that the department made the new hires, and officials didn’t tell the mayor or city council that administrators failed to make the hires until 7NEWS started asking questions.

"Did you know until recently that 40 people hadn't been hired?" Ferrugia asked Hickenlooper.

"No, I didn’t," the mayor said.

Hickenlooper said a detailed DDHS analysis showed that the average caseload for DDHS workers was within the national standard, and with a city budget shortfall, DDHS decided not to make the additional hires.

But DDHS could not have made a detailed analysis, CALL7 investigators learned, because they could not provide basic statistics about historic caseloads at the agency and changed current department caseloads three times when 7NEWS requested the data.

Hickenlooper also did not know that 22 percent of DDHS child protection caseworkers have more than the national standard and that eight out of 10 DDHS supervisors in child protection have more employees than the national standard recommends.

"If a person has 18-20 cases and something happens next week are you going to tell me our procedures are in place … or are you going to say the caseloads are too high?" Ferrugia asked.

"I would probably say the caseloads are too high," Hickenlooper said.

Hickenlooper said DDHS employees probably got caught up in the budget problems and just didn’t make the hires.

"There’s a significant budget crisis going on and they are trying to put their thumbs in a lot of different dikes and they didn’t keep their eye on the ball," Hickenlooper said. "If we are short caseworkers now, we will hire them."