Louisiana Voice

Even as the governor’s office was imposing travel and spending freezes as the state continued to struggle with an overwhelming budget deficit last fall, the Office of Group Benefits (OGB) was spending nearly $9,600 to send two of its top executives on five separate trips to California and Florida to train new phone bank employees to handle inquiries about pending changes to health coverage for state employees, retirees and dependents.

The expenditures also occurred in the wake of Gov. Bobby’s depletion of the OGB reserve fund from $500 million before privatization of the agency to less than half of that by last September.

A Division of Administration (DOA) employee with close ties to Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols and Deputy Commissioner Ruth Johnson revealed to LouisianaVoice last year that DOA had contracted with Ansafone which has offices to set up the phone bank to take calls from OGB members.

When we were first told of the contract, we understood the company to be Answerphone, Inc., which is in Albany, N.Y. We later learned, however, that the company was actually Ansafone with offices in Santa Ana, California and Ocala, Florida.

The dates of travel for Elise Williams Cazes and Charles Guerra to destinations in California and Florida were from Sept. 9 through Nov. 13 with Cazes running up travel, lodging, meal and car rental expenses of $5,553.74 in three trips and Guerra accounting for the remaining $4,044.33 in his two trips, records show.

Guerra is the Chief Operating Officer for OGB while Cazes, previously employed by Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana (BCBS), was appointed Group Benefits Administrator last June.

The requirements for her position as the Medical/Pharmacy administrator responsible for benefit plan management and vendor performance were written especially to her qualifications, according to our same DOA source.

LouisianaVoice made a public records request on Oct. 4 for a record of Guerra’s expenses but received a response from DOA on Oct. 13 which said, “The Division of Administration has no records which are responsive to your request.”

But when DOA finally did comply with our request on Jan. 23—and only after we filed a lawsuit against the state on Jan. 16—records indicated that OGB CEO Susan West approved meal expenses of $457 for Guerra for the dates of Sept. 30 through Oct. 5. West signed off on that approval on Oct. 10, three days prior to DOA’s denial of the existence of expense records, meaning DOA had at least partial records in response to our request.

Moreover, records show that the state was billed $732.39 for Guerra’s hotel reservations for that trip on Sept. 23, a full 11 days before our request for the records was submitted and nearly three weeks prior to DOA’s denial of the records.

Likewise, Enterprise Car Rental invoiced the state another $225.82 on Oct. 5 for lease of a vehicle during Guerra’s visit to Santa Ana.

Finally, records reveal that Shorts Travel Management, which books all travel for state employees, billed the state $675.39 on Sept. 23 for Guerra’s Sept. 30 flight to California and his return to Baton Rouge on Oct. 5.

So, bottom line, the state was billed $2,090.60 for travel, car rental, lodging and meals for the first of Guerra’s two trips to California—all well before denial our public records on the basis of DOA’s claim that no such records existed.

For Guerra’s second trip to California, from Nov. 10 through Nov. 13, DOA paid $949.84 for his flight, $290.12 for his meals, $176.77 for his car rental, and $537 for his hotel. The remaining $175 was for parking, airline baggage fees and booking fees for both trips.

Cazes ran up her $5,553.74 in charges for two trips to California and one to Gainesville, Florida, as well as several trips for meetings in various localities in Louisiana in her personal vehicle.

She cost the state $787 for meals for the three out-of-state trips, along with $506.74 in parking and in-state travel in her vehicle, $2,452.34 for airline tickets, $532.80 in car rental fees, $1,197.86 for hotels and $77 in ticket booking fees.

In addition to the $9,598.07 in travel, lodging and related expenses for the two, the state also entered into a $1 million contract with Ansafone to hire 200 persons in California and Florida to field calls about sweeping changes being proposed for OGB at the time.

The “training” that Cazes and Guerra conducted on their trips consisted of a few days of reading handouts distributed to new employees hired to man the phone banks. At the end of training and the first day actually on the job the employees were informed that what they had been told in the training sessions was wrong and the Ansafone web page containing its “Five Star Recipe for Customer Service Failure” was subsequently taken down.