Secretary of State Tom Schedler says Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration may have improperly destroyed records in the state employee health insurance program, which is in the middle of a heavily criticized rewrite of benefit plans.
The Associated Press reports Schedler, who oversees the archiving of state records, says the Office of Group Benefits appears to have destroyed items without the approvals required under state law. The accusations are outlined in a series of letters from Schedler to the insurance program office, urging compliance with the law.
“This Office has reason to believe that some original claim records may have been destroyed without prior approval,” Schedler wrote earlier this month to Susan West, director of the Office of Group Benefits. He describes that as a “direct violation” of state law.
The Jindal administration says no health insurance program records were destroyed without first being backed up electronically. But Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols acknowledges the Office of Group Benefits hasn’t been sending all of its records to Schedler’s office anymore. She says the insurance program stopped sending claims records this summer, because of privacy concerns about sharing personal medical information across agencies.
“None of our records have been destroyed. The question at hand was whether or not specific claims level data, the claims themselves, have to be archived,” Nichols says. “All of those claims have been maintained in our system of scanning and filing and archiving documents.”
Schedler’s office placed “a legal hold” in August on the disposal of any of the documents in the Office of Group Benefits while the agency was making sweeping changes to the state worker health insurance program. It wasn’t immediately clear as of this afternoon if the attorney general’s office would intervene.
