State senators calling for audit of Department of Health and Human Services | SCNOW

State senators calling for audit of Department of Health and Human Services | SCNOW

Some state senators say they're going to investigate the state Department of Health and Human Services and are calling for an audit of the agency after they say the Sanford administration instructed the head of the agency to mislead lawmakers about the agency's budget.

DHHS is running a $125 million deficit in the current budget year. It had been $225 million short, but the state Budget and Control Board agreed that the state will cover $100 million of the shortfall.

Former DHHS director Emma Forkner testified before senators Wednesday about the agency's budget and its deficit. Sen. Vincent Sheheen, D-Camden, says what he understood from her testimony is that Gov. Mark Sanford's chief of staff, Scott English, instructed Forkner to give lawmakers false information about the agency's budget needs.

"She was told to use a 4 percent number in the agency growth when, in fact, she believed that it would be higher," Sen. Sheheen says. "I think that was not appropriate. I think that if the number was being changed then we, the General Assembly, and the public should have been told that it was being changed."

He says the fact that lawmakers budgeted 4 percent growth for the agency, when it had been experiencing growth in Medicaid of 9 or 10 percent a year, is why the agency has a deficit now. That deficit has forced the agency to eliminate some services and cut back on others.

Sheheen, Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston and others are asking the Legislative Audit Council to audit the agency.

But Forkner says her testimony is being taken out of context. In an email response to our questions for this story, she replied, "Absolutely no one in Gov. Sanford's administration told me to mislead lawmakers about the Medicaid budget. It was quite the opposite. They asked me to be transparent, communicate with legislators and stakeholders, which I did.

"During the executive budgeting process an expenditure growth rate was targeted at 4 percent. This was done in the context the agency would implement cost-saving measures and the legislature would restore flexibility. Since the legislature did not restore rate-setting flexibility, cost-saving measures which the agency implemented were not enough to achieve the targeted 4 percent growth rate. Therefore, the actual growth rate was higher than expected."

Senators discussed the issue Thursday on the Senate floor and Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, also defended the Sanford administration. Davis served as Sanford's chief of staff at one point.

He backs up Forkner, saying there was no deception. "What the governor had realized, Gov. Sanford, and what the chief of staff had realized that we can't afford a 9, 10, 11 percent growth in health care each year, and so he had instructed his HHS director to ask for 4 percent and to ask for various reforms in terms of flexibility to allow the HHS director to control costs," he says.

He and Forkner are referring to attempts to get lawmakers to remove a restriction that prevents the state from renegotiating the rate it pays doctors and hospitals for Medicaid services. If it removed the restriction and the state paid lower rates, the growth in the Medicaid budget would have been closer to the 4 percent goal, they say.

Since lawmakers did not remove that restriction, there was no way to control Medicaid costs and they grew closer to 10 percent, which is why the agency is running a deficit.

Scott English didn't want to comment until after he gives his testimony to senators, but he did say of the Sanford administration, "We would never ask an agency director to deceive a legislator or a committee."