Gov. Bill Ritter has ordered his staff to review an audio recording in which state employees appear to tell an accountant to hide information about millions of dollars owed the federal government.
In the recording from a meeting at the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing on April 24, the accountant is asked to separate her computer files so that federal auditors will see only that Colorado has over-billed them for one year instead of for four years.
The accountant was fired after she argued with supervisors and spoke with 9News. Department director Joan Henneberry called her “disgruntled.”
“I found the taped conversation in your story very disturbing and I’ve asked members of my senior staff to get with Director Henneberry to look at the content of the recording and the circumstances under which the recording occurred,” Ritter said in a statement to 9News.
Henneberry says she has not listened to the entire taped conversation even though the recording has been at her office since May.
“The staff were not asking for the files to be concealed,” Henneberry said. “They were asking the files to be separated so that it was clear what year they were dealing with.”
Department accountant Annmarie Maynard was fired Monday after she spoke publicly about the recorded meeting and accounting errors to 9Wants to Know. The department has known about the human errors made in the Children’s Basic Health Plan Plus since December 2006 and the programming errors in Medicaid since December 2007, according to internal memos.
