Audit finds HHSC workers overpaid, undertrained

Group urges Dewhurst investigationASSOCIATED PRESSThursday, September 04, 2008
HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Audit: Most agency workers lack training

Most employees at the five agencies of the Health and Human Services Commission are not given required training and more than 1,000 fired employees continued to get paid over the past two years, according to a state audit released Wednesday.

The agency, which employs about 50,000 people and has an annual payroll of about $2.2 billion, had not administered commission-required training courses to 92 percent of supervisors hired between Sept. 1, 2006, and March 31, 2008, auditors said. Only 43 percent of agency employees hired during that time had completed at least one of the required training courses.

Commission spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said the agency is working on a notification system so managers know when employees have not completed required training.

The audit also found that the commission continued to pay 1,229 terminated employees in the past two years. Those payments amounted to more than $738,000.

Goodman said more than half of the overpayments have been recovered and the agency is working to recover the rest.

This comment was under the article, and my response to it is in red below that:

HHSC paid terminated employees $738,000 for two years. That sounds like a major fraud to me. Where are the HHSC Inspector Generals? Where are the HHSC Internal Auditors? Simple audit procedure could have detected this type of error. It looks like the Inspector General and the Internal Audit Director were asleep on the job. In the private business both will be fired. Let's see what HHSC will do. I bet you nothing.

Internal Office of Inspector General (OIG) is too busy right now going into field offices and putting caseworkers on levels for forwarding joke emails. /smirk