The Other Shoe Drops

We had been hearing rumors that another Medicaid audit was going to be released but the report finally came Thursday. The audit showed that as many as a dozen state employees collected more than 500,000 dollars in overtime that was never properly vetted or authorized over a six year period. The payments went to employees, some of them exempt from State Personal Act rules, in an effort to expedite the new Medicaid information and billing system, now several years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.

In the big world of Medicaid a half a million dollars is not much, but this is yet another indicator of a program and a department that lacks good management. Sadly, the person responsible for managing the design and implementation of the system received about 40 percent of the overtime bucks, while eight other managers racked up 47 percent of the overtime and rank and file employees got 12 percent. The justification for the overtime was that the feds were likely going to pay for it and the extra work would likely speed up the system which was due to go online in 2011. Wrong!

One does have to question the timing of these two recent audit reports. A simple understanding of the audit process recognizes that months are involved from the time the audit is conducted, the agency is allowed to review and respond to the report, the report is finalized and finally issued. Why release them after a new administration has come into office? Without trying to make an inference or accusation one has to wonder if one or both reports might have been released prior to the end of the Perdue administration.